Wikipedia:Spellchecking
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See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style (spelling)
Contents |
[edit] Rationale
[edit] Dialects
Be careful about setting the language of the text to the right dialect of English. (See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English.) If the article isn't about a topic tied to a particular region, check which dialect of English the first nonstub version of the article was written in. This can require a bit of effort, depending on the presence of "dialect marker" words. If you see spellings like "color" or "center" in the first nonstub version, the spelling was almost certainly American (though it might have been Western Canadian). Spellings like "criticise" mean the article was definitely not written in American English, and very likely not Canadian English, but which of the Commonwealth varieties of English it is may be difficult to determine. However, the differences among the Commonwealth dialects, especially those outside of Canada, are very small. Note: some Wikipedians claim that if the dialect of an article has "drifted" from its first nonstub version, via a series of unmotivated spelling changes, then the dialect to which the article has drifted should be considered the "correct" dialect of the article.
[edit] Implementation
[edit] Using MS Office or OpenOffice.org
The default setting in MS Office is with spell and grammar checking on, so just hit the Wikipedia "Edit" button for your article, copy the raw article source, paste it into a new Word or Writer document and follow the red (spelling) and green (grammar) markers and correct mistakes as necessary. If checking is not automatic, you may have to go to the menu Tools -> "Grammar and spell checking" or some such. When satisfied, simply copy and paste the text back into the text box in the browser window, check that any UTF-8 characters are still working as before by clicking "Show changes" and if satisfied, finally click "Save page" as usual.
[edit] Using Firefox
The current version of Mozilla Firefox, 2.0, has spell checking built in.
[edit] Live spellcheck
If you've installed the anti-vandal tool in your Monobook.js, you can use the live spellcheck to help correct common misspellings. Note that this is not a comprehensive spellcheck, it only points out the most commonly misspelt words.
