Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fix common mistakes

Aside - repetitive 'and'

"In this scene, the King, and, I think, the Queen are present". As shown, there should be a comma between the King and and, and and and I.

-- Solipsist 20:34, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Shouldn't that be either

• There should be a comma between the King and and, and and and I think.
• There should be a comma between King and and, and and and I.

...? :-) -- Smjg 11:18, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

(Doradus) No, it should be this:

As shown, there should be a comma between "the King" and "and", and "and" and "I".

Checking miscapitalized adjectives

Very often, names of languages and ethnic groups are not capitalized when they should be, i.e., french, english, instead of French, English. That could be checked too. Danny 14:26, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It turns out that there indeed is a very large amount of such errors in the article space. I have put a selection of the articles that contain such words on the project page. Thanks for the idea! Sietse 17:55, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I broke the list into manageable pieces. I THINK it's less daunting, but I KNOW it lessens the burden on the server. I apologize if this causes a problem, but I was attempting to be bold! Make sure that if it is a problem, you take a moment to slap me around a little! Brian Sayrs 01:22, 2004 Dec 5 (UTC)

No need to slap anyone around a little :) Good idea! It certainly looks less overwhelming this way. I'll keep this in mind when putting the next list on-line.

Wasn't that list a bit small in fact? I am doing the same fixes, sorted by article creation date, and the last 300 articles I fixed were not in your list (Zazou, Saramaka, Rubem Fonseca are the latest), despite having the exact same miscapitalised words. Any idea why they are missing? Sam Hocevar 08:58, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I deliberately kept the list incomplete to make it look less daunting. I thought it would discourage potential contributors if they are faced with a list of a few thousand articles that contain mistakes. My intention was to split the list of problem articles into batches of about 1000 entries and try to fix those in a period of a few weeks. Btw, 300 articles?, great job! -- Sietse 09:15, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think you should make it clear when these should be capitalized, and when not.. because i believe in many.. possibly most cases, it is correct not to capitalize. [comment by anonymous user]

Which cases do you mean? As far as I know, adjectives that are derived from proper nouns should always be capitalized in English. I have learned it this way; the capitalization article and the grammar guide in my dictionary say this too. But please tell me if I'm wrong or if this is not correct in all variants of English. Sietse 17:12, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"french fries" should be left uncapitalised, because the "french" there comes from the verb "to french". Also, "cousin-german", "brother-german". Sam Hocevar 17:54, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sam makes a great point...especially how often "french fries" shows up in the 'pedia. It makes you wonder a little! Brian Sayrs 18:50, 2004 Dec 5 (UTC)

Thanks guys, I forgot to filter for those words. Anyway, seems like we'll have to include 'French fries' occurences that are not at the beginning of a sentence in the next run :) Sietse 19:10, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

TODO:

• italian
• peruvian
• estonian
• algerian
• wikipedian ;)

Yes, I've only checked for fourteen such adjectives. The next run will contain words which I thought would be less common (italian, peruvian, estonian, algerian, ...) Sietse 10:32, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

And fourteen made quite a list in itself, didn't it!

Don't forget soviet... --Dryazan 22:49, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Beware this one: when meaning pertaining to the Soviet Union, it's Soviet; however, when talking about the council, it's soviet. Sam Hocevar 11:01, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I noticed a link in entheogen was changed from Aborigine to Aborigine. This seems pedantic to me ... is there really any good reason why we should care about the capitalization of text the reader will never see? (If there is, it should be Aborigine.) (For those who are wondering what I'm on about, edit this text to see the differences) Rkundalini 00:39, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The idea is that it avoids going through the same false positives again and again, while being completely harmless whatsoever. Also, I dream of a day when Wikipedia article names are fully case sensitive :-) Sam Hocevar 01:47, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Bug in pages with slashes?

In miscaptialized words, List of people by name was listed a number of times, yet none of the listed errors were present. I suspect the actual errors are on "List of people by name/something" but the page name got truncated at the slash. However, there are so many sub-pages to that particular page that I can't confirm this theory. --Doradus 00:01, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the report. I've looked into it, and it turns out that the miscapitalization-finding script actually does what it should do. The culprit is the program that adds wiki-syntax to the output of that script: it doesn't handle colons in titles properly. I'll fix it with the next run of the script. Sietse 11:23, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

WikiProject

Why not make this is a proper WikiProject so that someone else can upload the lists? Brianjd | Why restrict HTML? | 03:11, 2005 Mar 30 (UTC)

I have stopped working on this project for at least a while. I'm not working on Wikipedia stuff, except for occasional minor fixes, until my master's thesis is finished. If anyone else wants to add lists to the page in the mean time , or move/copy the page, or convert it to a WikiProject that's fine with me (of course). Sietse 12:47, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)