Slashdot Mirror
The Curious Case of Increasing Misspelling Rates On Wikipedia
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?"
Every web browser as auto spell-check capabilities these days. Most of them correct as you type.
So why should there be any misspellings on something that is managed strictly from a web interface?
Is it part of the arrogance of those electing themselves to write and editing articles on wiki that they refuse to use a spell checker, or
is it that the words are simply unknown to the normal spell-check dictionaries?
I find occasional misspellings in mainstream news articles as well (and I am by no means a natural born speller).
But most maddening to me is the "they're their there" errors, and similar wrong word usage.
Spell checkers offer little help in catching these, but a 6th grade education usually suffices.
Maybe the same people who wont waist there time checking they're spelling also cant be bothered to use the write word. ;-)
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Whether it's open source software or online collaborative projects, the smart people always get driven away over the long term. Smarter people are usually more interested in creating high-quality content, whereas stupider people end up putting out crap purely for political reasons. Eventually these stupider people start trying to modify the work of the smarter people, but do a poor job at it. When they're called out on their shitty work by the smart people, the fools make a huge stink. This soon devolves into a political mess where the smarter contributor is severely inhibited from contributing by the constant moaning and bitching of the idiots. Not wanting to waste time with such shenanigans, the smarter person leaves for some other endeavor. After a while, many of the smarter people are driven away, and the end result is that the stupider people make up the bulk of the project's contributions.
We've seen this happen with many open source software projects, and I don't think that other kinds of online collaborative projects are any different.
Or moar ppl frm teh txting gener8on.
sudo mod me up
I can offer my own opinion of this phenomenon: the bad is driving out the good. Fewer competent writers are bothering to edit Wikipedia articles nowadays. Not only do contributions get reverted / deleted by editors who think they "own" the article, but good writers simply get tired of fixing the semi-literate ramblings of people who cannot write a coherent sentence.
It's the old axiom that incompetent people cannot recognize their own incompetence, and so do not realize that their "contributions" are not improving the article, but instead are making it worse. Eventually the good contributors get tired of sweeping back the ocean with a broom, and just walk away from Wikipedia.
So slashdot has just posted an article about a test where even the test's AUTHOR believes the results are due to shortcomings in the test itself. This has to be the most pointless article I've read in a while...
The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources.
[citation needed]
#DeleteChrome
... and the growth in size of many articles, combined with the limited number of Wikipedia editors, is one possible reason why spelling errors may be on the increase. Also, one form of vandalism is the intentional introduction of spelling errors.
Is not the increase in rates, and that crowdsourcing doesn't solve the problem, but that spell checkers don't solve the problem. What's up with that?
icebike is a victim of Muphry's Law.
which don't even always follow normal English phonetic conventions
Wait, English has normal phonetic conventions?
I think some the issue here is that a new generation is showing up with poor literacy skills. The primary schools are under pressure to meet their government mandated competency requirements, budget cuts, and various other issues, and have cut back on some of the basic skills that were once taught.
I work at a tutoring center / assistance center at a college and it is depressing what students are coming out of high school in their basic literacy skills. Writing skills are non-existing, were some of them do not even know how to hold a pencil correctly and unless there is a computer with a spell checker, their spelling is limited to about the 4th grade level.
I have been seeing this for several years now and these are the people that are replacing the older generation of people who did not have computers as evasive as it is now.
It's sad. Through all this web content, I am slowly unlearning how to spell or use proper grammar.
English teachers / professors (with a few exceptions) used to be my arch-enemies (as a math / science person) and wished them all a pleasant, if sudden, death for their batshit-insane insistence on making mountains out of molehills (i before e, except after c; can't end a sentence with a preposition; this {subject}) with regards to the language, and yet lately I finding myself wishing there were more of them.
It's not fair: I've nursed some of those grudges for years!
I am John Hurt.
The increase in the percentage of spelling errors is an artifact of his experimental procedure. He randomly takes a Wikipedia article instead of analyzing the most popular ones. As Wikipedia has become larger, it has attracted more fringe topics, probably from authors in different countries in the world where English is not their first language. Wikipedia now probably has more articles that aren’t viewed and revised as much. Thus, randomly sampling has now higher chances of selecting such articles and thus, higher spelling mistakes.
He should change his experiment so that he analyzes the spelling mistakes on the most accessed and modified pages in Wikipedia or discard articles where the activity on the article is below a certain threshold.
After the last time I tried to clean up some grammar and spelling in an article and it was immediately reverted with "didn't cite sources" I gave up.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I blame Star Trek for that one, though.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We awl noe wot ure saeng no mader howe u spell it.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
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.
Part of the problem is the article selection methodology. By pulling random articles, the study author is going to be getting mostly articles that have received little attention, and mostly short articles. (Table 2 and Graph 2 show this very clearly--of the 2400 articles examined, only 14 existed in 2001. Half of them didn't exist until 2007. A quarter were created between 2009 and the present.) It's possible that what has been demonstrated is simply that relatively new articles on relatively unimportant topics tend to be less-well maintained.
The major issue is the corpus used for the study. While a half-million-word dictionary sounds impressive, it's still going to fall down in a couple of key areas. For one, foreign-language terms are likely to be nearly completely unrepresented. For another, a lot of proper nouns are going to be missing. If I write an article about Japanese manga or a Norwegian village, I'm going to be including all kinds of things that an English-language dictionary just isn't going to contain. (Worse, I'll get two misspellings for each Japanese term, since I'll have it in the article with both the original Japanese word plus the romanized transliteration). Another problem area will almost certainly be articles on highly technical topics (molecular biology is full of new and unusual abbreviations).
While certain classes of 'obvious' non-words aren't counted, many will be missed. For example, the article preprocessor filters out percentages, but will pass through numbers followed by the degree symbol (which will show up in scientific and geographic articles).
What is noticeably lacking from the report is any mention of manual checking performed by the author to evaluate the accuracy of the results generated by the spell checker. Table 4 reports that about five percent of articles contain more than 25% misspelled words(!); honestly, even people on Twitter don't (generally) show that level of illiteracy. Are there certain types of articles which are responsible for these grossly inflated counts?
In summary -- sloppy methods give useless results. No news.
~Idarubicin
Many people say it as "24th of December, 2011" rather than "December 24th, 2011". Even in the USA you have "4th of July" holiday instead of "July 4th" holiday.
No one ever, ever, cites a diff when they are bitching about Wikipedia on Slashdot.