The Curious Case of Increasing Misspelling Rates On Wikipedia 285
An anonymous reader writes "The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources. As the saying goes, the more eyes the better. One particular student who was curious about this conducted rudimentary text mining on a sampling of the Wikipedia corpus to discover how misspelling rates on Wikipedia change through time. The results appear to indicate an increasing rate of misspellings through time. The author proposes that this consistent increase is the result of Wikipedia contributors using more complex language, which the test is unable to cope with. How do the results of this test compare to your own observations on the detail accuracy of massively crowd-sourced applications?"
Re:Spellink chekers. Duh! (Score:5, Informative)
But written Australian English is different from North American English.
In N.A. things are similar TO each other or they are different FROM each other.
We would no more say Different TO than we would say Similar FROM. Just seems wrong to our ears.
Muphry's Law (Score:5, Informative)
icebike is a victim of Muphry's Law [wikipedia.org].
Grammar editors like me got scared off Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Lazy writers and poor writing skills (Score:3, Informative)
This may sound like a get off my lawn type post, but from what I've seen it seems that the writing ability of younger people has severely declined. And it's not even that big a difference in age that I'm talking about here, I'm talking about people less than 10 years younger than me. I "abuse" the language a fair amount myself, but I'm talking about seeing people thinking column has a b in it, and despair doesn't have an e. There are fluctuations in the language that I'm used to; such as the color vs. colour thing; but basic spelling problems that would not be correct in any dialect seems to be pretty common. And of course we have the their vs. there problem.
Re:Spellink chekers. Duh! (Score:3, Informative)
Off of
On to
"On of" makes no sense, which is why it sounds wrong : because it is wrong.
"On to" (or onto) sounds fine. Because it is perfectly correct.
Your confusion is caused by your assumption that the same preposition structure would be used in dissimilar situations.
I have no clue what the technical name is for the OF following OFF. But what ever it is, it must match. Omitting it seems fine in either case, but if used it must be correct.
Re:ISO 8601 (Score:2, Informative)