Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss

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The moss project seeks to find and remove the furry green typos that have been growing on Wikipedia articles. It uses software written by User:Beland to automatically find misspellings, mistakes in English grammar, violations of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, and confusing or broken wiki markup.

Dearth to tyops!

QUICK LINK TO THE BEST PAGE FOR NEW PARTICIPANTS

About misspellingsEdit

How the lists are madeEdit

The moss spell checker is run against a recent set of database dumps, which are generated on the 1st and 20th of every month (but take a few days to process). All the articles in the English Wikipedia are examined. The following are ignored:

  • Text inside references, templates, tables, quotation marks, sections like "External links" and "Works", and some other weird places.
  • Capitalized words (which are presumed to be correctly-spelled proper nouns)
  • Words that appear in titles in the English Wiktionary (which has definitions of all words in all languages, excluding proper nouns and systematic words like chemical names and large numbers)
  • Words that appear in titles in the English Wikipedia (which explains some things that don't appear in the dictionary)
  • Words that appear in titles in the Wikispecies (which has many technical words that don't appear in the dictionary or encyclopedia)

Many mistakes are not (yet) caught:

  • Improper addition of 's (possessives are not added to Wiktionary, so these are excluded systematically)
  • Incorrect capitalization
  • Incorrect multi-word phrases
  • Wrong word used in context
  • Non-English language words not tagged with {{lang}} or where an English misspelling happens to be the same as a word in another language. (These are counted as correct spellings if they are in the English Wiktionary, which lists words in all languages – only the definitions are restricted to English.)
  • Other situations listed in #False negatives below

New statisticsEdit

See also: Older statistics

In the year from March 2019 to March 2020, moss volunteers fixed over 94,000 typos! The most impressive progress is in the T1 category (single-letter misspellings), where we eliminated about half from the English Wikipedia. During this period we also started fixing missing spaces (focusing on those around punctuation) and those have dropped by about one-fifth. As we make progress, clear misspellings are increasingly mixed in with unclear cases; I'll be doing some more work on separation algorithms to keep the typo reports useful, so you'll probably see some more changes to typo classifications. Thanks to everyone who has been helping out! -- Beland (talk) 16:54, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Reporting symbol Explanation Change from 2019-03-01 to 2020-02-20 Instances, 2020-04-01 dump (9f6d726) Instances, 2020-04-20 dump (5ff589d) Instances, 2020-05-01 dump (1a96ded) Instances, 2020-05-20 dump (e511f74) Instances, 2020-06-01 dump (509f79a) Instances, 2020-06-20 dump (825ceb4) Instances, 2020-07-01 dump (db9db23) Instances, 2020-07-20 dump (caa619f) Instances, 2020-08-01 dump (cf76e8c) Instances, 2020-08-20 dump (f104e58) Instances, 2020-09-01 dump (4654d88) Instances, 2020-09-20 dump (a26ccca) Instances, 2020-10-01 dump (686f5db) Instances, 2020-10-20 dump (4f90810) Instances, 2020-11-01 dump (ac54580)
TS Missing or extra whitespace or dash (or new compound) -39368 (-21%) 145297 144673 331658** 330624 328249 325399 324179 322282 321801 318621 317183 315825 314747 312110 310537
T1 Edit distance 1 from common English word -36192 (-48%) 41090 41081 39967 39452 38783 38379 38436 38271 37803 36783 35976 34036 33539 33764 32347
T2 Edit distance 2 from common English word -7560 (-10%) 64526 63263 60690 60321 59589 58603 58649 58521 58200 58085 57845 57329 57152 57487 57387
T3 Edit distance 3 from common English word -5276 (-7%) 74396 73255 70516 70039 68887 68192 68149 68020 67769 67788 67482 67226 67025 67101 67002
R Regular word (A-Z only) not near a common English word -3525 (-3%) 97726 96916 94793 93855 93252 91537 91489 91746 91521 91729 91513 91613 91339 91813 92329
I Definitely not English (International) due to accents or mixed with punctuation (other than hyphen) -22196 (-24%) 72151 69118 65842 64827 63630 61844 61888 61782 61899 62113 61916 62003 62049 62274 62287
W Not in English Wiktionary, in non-English Wiktionary -6764 (-8%) 75913 74351 86935 85604 83173 81894 81946 82173 81943 82170 81912 81968 81792 81256 81052
L Probable Romanization (transLiteration) +81 (+2%) 4435 4486 4266 4199 4120 4122 4104 4113 4137 4140 4151 4164 4165 4207 4203
ME Probable coMpound, English (with and without dash) +976 (+2%) 52269 48761 47187 47153 46830 46856 46967 47163 47052 47170 47009 47070 47066 47045 47023
MI Probable coMpound, non-English (International) in English Wiktionary (both A-Z and non-ASCII characters, with and without dash) -18475 (-9%) 177646 176929 171484 169592 166216 164828 165140 165351 165605 166016 166208 166499 166572 167349 167961
MW Probable coMpound, found in non-English Wiktionary -5544 (-11%) 46113 45103 43501 42931 40436 41383 41325 41440 41173 41234 40990 40956 40795 40353 40272
ML Probable coMpound, transLiteration -124 (-3%) 3909 3874 3707 3663 3672 3575 3589 3593 3628 3639 3658 3717 3724 3779 3769
C Chemistry words -176 (-9%) 1782 7564 7530 7644 7640 7655 7658 7659 7660 7662 7654 7644 7659 7661 7665
N A-Z plus numbers and hyphens -1391 (-5%) 25209 23813 22650 22511 22290 22020 22052 22053 21971 22009 21960 21923 21879 21856 21885
Z Decimal fraction missing leading Zero - 47* 0* 11405** 11418 11414 11398 11402 11421 11455 11530 11546 11578 11598 11669 11683
P Patterns (e.g. rhyme schemes) -20 (-43%) 27 28 7 9 7 7 3 2 2 4 5 4 5 5 4
H HTML/XML/SGML tag -539 (-15%) 3010 2886 2938 2903 2904 2848 2693 2697 2680 2747 2757 2729 2565 2569 2542
HB Known bad HTML tag, like <font> -1080 (-7%) 14465 14121 12903 13928 12919 14733 14022 11428 11670 11198 10191 8860 8756 8842 9725
HL Bad HTML-like linking, like <http://...> -98 (-19%) 414 418 377 394 394 421 408 425 420 413 373 359 356 329 324
U URL -94 (-7%, from 2019-03-20) 1179 1152 1118 1134 1117 1122 1129 1124 1120 1124 1124 1103 1101 1099 1091
BC Bad characters -12678 (-6%, from 2019-09-01) 192230 190482 186651 186517 185572 178698 175325 166116 159095 124158 112959 112755 112695 112633 112479
BW Bad words -6542 (-5%, from 2019-09-20) 113682 106327 381288** 380259 378710 374982 375107 375206 375431 375306 374622 374740 374560 375010 375008
Total -39115 (-3%, from 2019-09-20) 1207516 instances 1188601 instances 1647413** instances 1638977 instances 1619804 instances 1600496 instances 1595660 instances 1582586 instances 1574035 instances 1535639 instances 1519034 instances 1514101 instances 1511139 instances 1510211 instances 1508575 instances
Parse failure Mismatched punctuation -5145 (-3%) 154084 articles + 40705 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 153033 articles + 40838 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 214365 articles + 37697 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 214463 articles + 37667 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 214101 articles + 37607 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 214465 articles + 37767 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 214732 articles + 37849 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 215081 articles + 37993 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 215447 articles + 38067 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 215915 articles + 38169 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 216227 articles + 38210 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 216472 articles + 38205 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 216738 articles + 38213 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 216991 articles + 38246 MOS:STRAIGHT violations 217192 articles + 38338 MOS:STRAIGHT violations
  • red = Probably need to fix
  • yellow = Unsorted
  • blue = Probably OK (but may need to verify)
  • bold = actively working on fixing

* Identification of Z was broken
** Affected by major bug fix for counting inter-word typos (e.g. involving punctuation)

Instructions for editorsEdit

Just like a regular spell checker, sometimes a word that's highlighted is really a misspelling and should be changed, but sometimes it is a correct spelling that needs to be added to the spell checker's dictionary (which in this case is the English Wiktionary and Wikispecies). For the below lists, here's how you can help:

  • For spelling mistakes: Click on the links to the individual Wikipedia articles, and edit them to correct the misspelling. Make sure this is actually a misspelling, and not a technical term that needs to be better explained, or an alternate spelling (possibly from a different regional variety of English).
  • For non-English words (including words from Old English and Middle English, since they are pronounced differently): Edit the article and use the {{lang}} or {{transl}} templates to mark all non-English passages. Template contents are ignored, so they will not show up in the next report. If you can define the word, it would still be helpful to add the non-English word to the English Wiktionary or the same-language Wiktionary if you speak that language. As of the March 20, 2019 dump, only words not found in any Wiktionary are reported by moss as misspellings. (The "home" Wiktionary for Old and Middle English words is the modern English one.)
    • If you don't know which language is being used, you can tag it with {{which lang}}. If you add a "reason=" parameter, that will change the pop-up tooltip text readers will see when they hover over "what language is this?". If you have a guess as to which language it might be, or any other question or comment, you can leave that here to help future editors. If you use this tag, you can delete the article from the moss listing; the article will be added to Category:Articles with unidentified words instead, and ignored by future runs of moss until the mystery is solved.
    • For languages that don't have a code (often happens with historical languages), use "mis" and add an HTML comment indicating the language. For example: {{lang|mis|sharbe do kin ratz}}<!-- Old Runish -->
  • For incorrect spellings in direct quotes:
    • These shouldn't be picked up by the spell checker, as text in double quotes "" is ignored. The article probably has incorrect punctuation.
    • Regardless of punctuation problems, you can add {{sic}} around the word or phrase. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotations for guidance.
  • For correct spellings that belong in the dictionary: Click on the word to add it to the English Wiktionary. Remember the word might not be English (though the definition must be) and be sure to check capitalization!
  • For correct spellings already in the dictionary: Delete from the list or strike through; these have been added in the meantime since the database dump by other editors. They do not automatically turn red as internal Wikipedia links do.
  • For correct spellings not appropriate for Wiktionary:
  • Correct or incorrect, when finished delete or strike out the entry for the word from the lists on this page (or subpages), so work won't be duplicated. It is preferred to delete the entry for sections that rotate through specific letters, and strikethrough for sections where the whole thing gets updated (to prevent duplicating work done while the dumps were being processed, which can take more than a week).
  • If an article or section has generally bad grammar, and you don't have time to fix the whole thing, just add {{copyedit}} at the top of the article or {{copyedit|section}} at the top of the affected section. If it's just a sentence or two, {{copy edit inline}} or {{incomprehensible inline}} can go at the end of the problem passage.
  • If you see errors being reported from footnotes or bibliographies, check to make sure the section is titled with a standard name following MOS:APPENDIX conventions. Standard end-matter sections like "References" and "Further reading" and "Works" are ignored.
  • If it helps to leave a message on the article's talk page asking if the word is correct or incorrect, you can use Template:Typo help like this when editing the bottom of the talk page (leave the section header blank; it will automatically be added):
{{subst:typo help|PUT WORD HERE}} -- ~~~~
  • NEW: If you are uncertain whether a word is spelt correctly or not, you can add {{typo help inline}} immediately after it. If you add a "reason=" parameter, that will change the pop-up tooltip text readers will see when they hover over "check spelling". You can add a specific question or comment that may help identification. If you use this tag, you can delete the article from the moss listing; the article will be added to Category:Articles with unidentified words instead, and ignored by future runs of moss until the mystery is solved.

Don't worry if you miss something; it will reappear in a future report if there are still mistakes.

Suggested edit summariesEdit

If you want to help publicize this project, you can copy-and-paste these into your edit summary, if appropriate.

For Wikipedia edits:

Fix misspelling found by [[Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss]] – you can help!
Tag non-English text found by [[Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss]] – you can help!
Tag correct text as {{not a typo}} for automated spell checkers (including [[Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss]])
Fix mismatched quote marks found by [[Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss]] – you can help!

For Wiktionary edits:

Add word identified by [[w:Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss]] – you can help!

Wiktionary cheat sheetEdit

Need to add a word to Wiktionary? The Wiktionary cheat sheet has copy-and-paste templates that make it easy for the types of words commonly encountered here, even if you've never done it before.

Misspellings - lists of things to fixEdit

Likely misspellings by article (main listing)Edit

The most efficient list to work on if all you want to do is fix misspellings. These listings try to list all the typos from a given article, so they can be fixed all at once. It also tries to only show typos that legitimately need fixing. It's not perfect, so a few words found need to be added to Wiktionary or tagged as not English, not a typo, etc. Only a few letters are updated on each run, to avoid stale listings as the whole list takes far longer than two weeks to work through. (This also avoids duplicating recent work when listings are refreshed.)

See subpages due to length:

Notes:

  • For more cases that require investigation, see Category:Articles with unidentified words.
  • Due to length and an increased number of false positives, typo reports for dumps 2020-05-20 and later don't include T2, T3, and TS+BRACKET.

Likely misspellings by frequency (a-m)Edit

(updated from 2020-05-20 dump)

The best list to work on if you want to eliminate all instances of a specific typo. Only typos that are very close to known words are shown. The algorithm is not perfect, so some of these may still be words that need to be added to Wiktionary. For each run, only words from half of the alphabet are shown, to avoid duplicate work from when new dumps are being processed.

Legitimate misspellings are candidates for Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings. If there is an obvious correction, adding that to Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings/For machines will help editors who use automated tools to fix cases faster.

Likely new English compounds by frequency (a-m)Edit

(Updated from 2020-05-20 dump.) The best list to work on if you want to add variations of known words to Wiktionary, mostly compound words. The algorithm is not perfect, so some of these might be common mistakes that need to corrected. For each run, only words from half of the alphabet are shown, to avoid duplicate work from when new dumps are being processed.

Likely new words by frequency, all languages (a-m)Edit

(updated from 2020-05-20 dump)

Good candidates for words to add to the English Wiktionary (which provides English definitions for words in all languages), as it seems English Wikipedia readers will frequently encounter them. For each run, only words from half of the alphabet are shown, to avoid duplicate work from when new dumps are being processed.

Most of the words are not from English. To get them off this list, you can either add an entry to the English Wiktionary (which provides English definitions for words in all languages) or tag all instances of the word on the English Wikipedia with {{lang}}. Wiktionary does not accept Romanizations for some languages, so those cases must be tagged as {{transl}} or {{lang}}.

m* 25 - wikt:mukhamandapa - Architecture of Karnataka, Arjuna Ratha, Baroli Temples, Chavundaraya Basadi, Group of Monuments at Mahabalipuram ... find all

Cases with notes from older dumps:

These all appear to be the Greek word 'οτι', which does not appear in wikt without breath marks. That is, see wikt:ότι, which then mentions forms wikt:τι, wikt:ὅτι, wikt:ό,τι.
It would appear then that the proper action is to mark all these quoted Greek texts with {{lang}}? ::Also, I think I'll ask over at wikt if it would be reasonable for them to have an entry for wikt:οτι. They do have an entry for wikt:oti, which mentions at least wikt:ότι and wikt:ό,τι, but not wikt:ὅτι. (sigh) Oh what a tangled web we wind, when first we endeavor these defined. Shenme (talk) 04:30, 13 October 2019 (UTC)
Additionally, many (all?) of these appear to be 'biblical' == classical == ancient Greek, which has ISO 639-2 code 'grc'. Modern Greek is ISO 639-1 code 'el', ISO 639-2 code 'gre'. Shenme (talk) 04:49, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
Ah, but not all. Some found with search are modern Greek, so lang|el, and some 'oti' found having breath marks. Currently searching using "οτι" -insource:"lang|grc" -insource:"lang|el" -insource:"lang|gre" and working on labelling any form of Greek. Shenme (talk) 02:27, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Likely new compounds by frequency (n-z)Edit

(Waiting for next dump; only words with manual notes are shown below.)

woge (I'm scared of this one Shenme (talk) 04:49, 16 July 2019 (UTC))
Oh, this probably just needs a Wikipedia redirect to an article that explains woging. -- Beland (talk) 08:27, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Most common words with slashesEdit

This is a special manual report from the 2019-08-20 dump. -- Beland (talk) 00:37, 31 August 2019 (UTC)

Compound units of measure, probably eligible for Wiktionary:

Actually, I made a "science word" filter that just needs to be expanded to cover these, though some are suffering mu/micro confusion. -- Beland (talk) 05:39, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

Probably need correcting or tagging in articles, per MOS:SLASH:

For WiktionaryEdit

This is a special section; putting a Wiktionary link here will cause a word to be ignored by the spell checker everywhere it appears (on the assumption it will soon be added to Wiktionary.)

Vocab pagesEdit


0-9Edit

AEdit

These were checked for misspellings and determined to be OK. They need to be added to Wiktionary or an exclusion list:

BEdit

CEdit

It looks like "niru" has been borrowed (at least in this article) into English, since it's getting an English plural, so "niru" and "nirus" should probably be added to Wiktionary. Though I'm unclear on the precise definition of "niru". -- Beland (talk) 00:52, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
Old English words should definitely be in English Wiktionary, but I also tagged it since Old English pronunciation is different. -- Beland (talk) 01:28, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

PEdit

YEdit

I think it just needs an entry in Wiktionary, then. -- Beland (talk) 19:34, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

By wordEdit

Most common non-English, missing from English WiktionaryEdit

These words are commonly found in English Wikipedia, are present in a non-English Wiktionary, but are missing from English Wiktionary. Word counts are from English Wikipedia. This is a special report from the 2019-08-20 dump.

Mineral wordsEdit

Several pages with lists of minerals are showing up as some of the pages with the most detected typos. Below is a list of words from these pages. I'm pretty sure some of them are misspelled, so they all require verification. I don't see anything in wikt:Wiktionary:CFI that would exclude these names; some but not all of them are IUPAC systematic. We could also add Wikipedia stubs or redirects as needed if Wiktionary doesn't want them. -- Beland (talk) 15:36, 30 May 2019 (UTC)

Needs Wikipedia article instead?Edit

Articles with the most possibly misspelled wordsEdit

These are likely to be lists using non-English-language or technical words.

  • For articles that are just lists of species names, please link to the article from Wikispecies:Wikispecies:Requested articles#From_Wikipedia and delete the entry here. Those are now automatically suppressed.
  • For non-English-language words, add {{lang}} around the foreign passages and delete the row. Articles that don't do this often have formatting of non-English words that is inconsistent either internally or with the Manual of Style, so this is an easy way to fix that at the same time as helping the spell checker and screen readers do the right things.

(Waiting for new dump; Beland mostly now just tags these with {{cleanup lang}}, {{you}}, or adds them to the Wikispecies request page directly, so you can find plenty of articles in those work queues if you like.)

Possible typos by lengthEdit

Longest or shortest in certain categories are shown, sometimes just for fun and sometimes because they form a useful group. Please use strikethrough (or leave a note) for this section rather than removing lines, to avoid repeating work done while the dumps were being processed. Thanks!

Likely chemistry wordsEdit

(updated from 2020-06-01 dump)

These need to be checked by a chemist and marked {{not a typo}}.

Probable DNA sequencesEdit

If you're sure this is a DNA or RNA sequence, tag it {{DNA sequence}}.

(All fixed; waiting for 2020-06-20 dump!)

Repeating patternsEdit

For rhyme schemes, they probably need to be re-styled to follow Wikipedia:WikiProject Poetry#Style for rhyme schemes. If this ends up making them all-caps, they won't show up here on the next run. For mixed-case rhyme scheme notations, use {{not a typo}} after making sure dashes, commas, and spaces follow the recommended style.

(2020-05-20 dump all fixed; waiting for 2020-07-01 dump)

For Beland todoEdit

  • Rhyme scheme hunting:
    • Sync style for articles in Category:Stanzaic form and Category:Rhyme and add to rhyme scheme list if appropriate.
    • Sync annotation style for articles that mark up poems line-by-line (use tables, not column divs or parens)
    • Manually search for patterns like:
      • a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c
      • AB,CD,AB (internal rhyme)
      • "aa", "ab", "aaa", "aab", "aba", "abb", "abc", "aaaa", "aaba", "aabb", "aabc", "abaa", "abab", "abba", "abca", "abcb", "abcc", "abcd" - probable rhyme sequences where there's an article present so it's not detected as a misspelling

False positivesEdit

Is there a word that is correctly used in an article, but which shouldn't be added to Wiktionary? List it here, and Beland will fix the problem.

Archived solutions: Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss/Archive

False negativesEdit

Is there a misspelled word in an article mentioned here that was not reported? Feel free to list it below and Beland will try to improve the code if appropriate.

These are currently over-ignored, but could be used to suggest correct spellings:

  • Wikipedia articles with {{R from misspelling}}, {{R from incorrect name}}, {{R from miscapitalisation}}, and redirects to these templates
  • Wiktionary entries that are known misspellings (e.g. wikt:anticiliary)
  • In cases where there are variant spellings of the same word or phrase, Wikipedia should probably pick one and stick to it except to mention the variants. This happens with:
    • Compound words - whether to use a space, dash, or nothing, as in "junebug" vs. "june bug" or "email" vs. "e-mail".
    • Words with multiple transliterations from another language (often there are multiple systems, no particular system, or a modern system different from historical systems).
    • Redirects with {{R from alternate spelling}} and redirects to that template.
  • Article Ana Recio Harvey | detected misspelling: appoinment | additional, undetected misspelling: enterpreneur
    • Looks like this was because of redirects with "enterpreneur" in the title. I have tagged them all {{R from misspelling}}, but I'll have to change the code to ignore those, as noted above. Thanks for catching that! -- Beland (talk) 23:52, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Archived notesEdit

See Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss/Archive.

Mismatched markup and punctuationEdit

Errors in punctuation (mostly quotation marks) and wiki markup generally cause confusion for readers, and also prevent the spell checker from running on these articles.

Inches and feet should not use " and ', per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Specific units; use letters instead. (See MOS:UNITS for general guidance.) Where conversions are needed, use {{convert}}, for example: 2 feet 3 inches (69 cm)

WORK IN PROGRESS

  • Integrating these with main listings
  • Filter only unmatched " for now
    • Filter articles with non-ASCII quote marks to a separate list for JWB processing
    • Filter \d" and \d' to a separate sublist for inch/feet style conversion
  • Explain ✂ or skip snippets showing this
  • Bracketbot web UI seems to be down

-- Beland (talk) 19:03, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

cquoteEdit

MOS:BLOCKQUOTE says {{cquote}} should be replaced by {{quote}} in articles.

Find all current instances. (35500 transclusions as of October 2019)

Gender-neutral languageEdit

MannedEdit

The word "manned" and related forms like "unmanned" are used in many articles, but is not gender-neutral as required by MOS:S/HE and the NASA style guide. Gender-neutral alternatives include:

  • Crewed, uncrewed
  • Staffed, unstaffed
  • Human spaceflight
  • Defended

Not all instances need to be changed.

  • Proper nouns should remain the same, like Manned Orbiting Laboratory
  • Titles of sources and quotes should remain unchanged.
  • If the term itself is being discussed, for example to say that "manned spaceflight" is another way of saying human spaceflight.
  • There seems to be consensus on unmanned aerial vehicle that this and related phrases (like unmanned aerial system) should remain intact, since it is much more frequent than "uncrewed aerial vehicle" at the moment. However, when using Wikipedia's voice it is preferred to describe a UAV as "uncrewed" when not using the whole phrase.
  • Non-article pages that are retained for historical interest shouldn't be modified if they won't be visible to readers.
  • Redirects with this title should be left alone if they are redirecting readers to a gender-neutral title

If the word is found the names of articles and categories (except those with names directly related to UAVs), those should be renamed, and the links changed. Many articles have already been renamed, and the links just need to be updated. (Remember that to rename a category, all the articles in that category must be edited to change their pointers.)

Borderline casesEdit

These may need to be discussed before being potentially renamed.

These are generic terms, like Human mission to Mars, as opposed to proper names like Manned Orbiting Laboratory. -- Beland (talk) 19:41, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

  • Manned Venus flyby - Based on the NASA style guide, NASA probably would now refer to this as "human Venus flyby" but historical sources say "manned Venus flyby" so that's what the majority of editors commenting on the talk page currently favor. There is some question as to whether the scope of the article concerns a specific mission or this type of mission in general, which is related to the proper name exception (but then the title would be "Manned Venus Flyby"). Compare Colonization of Venus and Human mission to Mars. -- Beland (talk) 19:41, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Objections in specific cases:

MarriageEdit

Wikipedia:Writing about women § Marriage points out:

LadiesEdit

Wikipedia:Writing about women § Girls, ladies prefers "women" to "ladies" except where part of set phrases or traditional titles (like first lady). find all lowercase "ladies"

Instructional and presumptuous languageEdit

MOS:NOTE says to avoid the following phrases when they address the reader directly. Not all instances are problematic, such as those in direct quotations.

Internationally comprehensible spelling and vocabularyEdit

MOS:COMMONALITY advises the use of vocabulary and spellings that are shared across national varieties of English, where possible. This section collects instances where an unshared term is being used which could be improved. For proper nouns and direct quotes, a translation or re-spelling into another dialect may be helpful.

looks like its wrapped up, with jail preferred except in proper nouns Xurizuri (talk) 15:36, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Currency styleEdit

Per MOS:CURRENCY:

  • For the UK, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, and South African pound, ₤ should be changed to £
  • ₤ is OK to use with Italian lira. Changing e.g. ₤100,000 to [[Italian lira|₤]]100,000 will prevent legitimate uses from showing up in automated reports, and also help readers understand that this is not British pounds. (Mentions of Italian lira are increasingly rare because it has been replaced by the Euro.)

Find all problem cases for ₤

Caution: Not all problem pages show up reliably; if you do a search, fix all the pages in the results, and then do another search, you will probably get a fresh batch of problem pages. It may also take a minute or two for fixed pages to disappear from the results, due to lag updating the search index.

Work is in progress on detecting and fixing other MOS-related issues with numbers and currencies.

Small capsEdit

Per MOS:BCE, smallcaps are not to be used for years like "400 BC". Find all instances of known smallcaps issues...

HTML tagsEdit

Updated from 2020-09-20 dump.

You can do one of two things for these articles:

  • Remove, repair, or convert the HTML markup to wiki markup yourself.
  • Tag the article {{cleanup HTML}} and it will show up under Category:Articles with HTML markup but not on this list. Use the "tags" parameter to indicate which tags are present on the page; many editors find it hard to locate the offending HTML. For example: {{cleanup HTML|tags=table, cite}}

How to clean upEdit

See Category:Articles with HTML markup for instructions on how to find the offending tags and what to do about them.

Find all articles by tagEdit

Can't wait for the next database dump? Want to look for or fix all instances of a specific tag? Use the links below!

Additional HTML problems are listed at Special:LintErrors.


Sometimes editors use angle brackets (< and >) for other purposes. Though these are not HTML markup, they often need to be fixed.

<<...>> find all can indicate:

  • French quotation marks rendered as <<quoted text>>. These should be normalized to "quoted text" or 'quoted text', even in quotations, per MOS:CONFORM.
  • A broken citation that should be converted to {{cite web}})

Other weirdness:

  • <the> - find all - More French quoting style, bad linking, bad citation style, etc.
  • <blockquote> sometimes shows up on the reports if it is capitalized or all-caps on the article page. It should be all lowercase.

Known bad HTML tags (HB)Edit

These are also included in the main listings.

Bad link formatting (HL)Edit

These are also included in the main listings. Angle brackets are not used for external links (per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Computing § Exposed URLs); "tags" like <https> and <www> are actually just bad link formatting. See Wikipedia:External links#How to link for external link syntax; use {{cite web}} for footnotes.

Unsorted (H)Edit

Many of these can be replaced by {{var}} (for text to be replaced) or {{angbr}} (e.g. for linguistic notation).

Need debuggingEdit

Notification of new dumpsEdit

"Most likely misspellings by articles" should always have work to do (if not, ping Beland to add more from the current dump). Some of the other sections are occasionally waiting for a new dump to get a useful list, either because they are ranked by frequency or a code change has been made to clean up noise in the next run. New runs are generally posted twice a month. The database snapshot from the first day of the month generally takes about 9-13 days to process, and the snapshot from the twentieth day of the month might take 4-6 days until it can be posted.

All that said, if you want to get a ping when results from a new dump are posted, you can add your name to the list below. If you are only interested in a particular section, include a note to that effect.

moss source codeEdit

moss is written in Python, and is available on github at: https://github.com/cdbeland/moss

Data is obtained from XML database backup dumps.

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