User talk:66.108.204.239

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[edit] Immigrate/emmigrate

I loved your recent edit -- in part because surely I should have known better than to have made this kind of error.

As it happens, there are times when it's quite delightful to be found wrong; and it pleases me all the more because my curious error persisted through several drafts. Really -- what more can I say?

Your edit struck a responsive chord.

Then when I looked at the history of your anonymous contributions to Wikipedia ...; and I see that you've managed to correct the same quite unexpected error across a broad swath of articles written by a variety of editors -- many, no doubt, who have as far better command of the English language than I.

Do tell me how you came to think of engaging in this specific project.

Perhaps more important, please tell me how you did it?

How does one engage such a search across otherwise disparate articles, as you have done? --Ooperhoofd (talk) 04:04, 30 December 2007 (UTC)


I am relatively unfamiliar with the nuances of Wikipedia, as you note. For one, I am uncertain how to reply to your note (email? edit this page? something else?). I don't know how to respond to messages, partly because I have never received one before.

I am not sure if your observation is sarcasm, criticizing my very minor changes to a number of pages or whether you are genuinely interested. If the latter, then the answer is really simple: use google to find "emigrate to" on wikipedia.org:

  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+%22emigrate+to%22

And all the edits I made were manual. So I: - found the occurrences of "emigrate from" using Google - visited each page in sequence - made each edit by hand

You really have to do this by hand because there are pages where I can't make the distinction, like on the Nogai page: "They emigrated either through Feodosia or Kerch ports or crossing via Buçak steppes to Dobruja." I don't know where Feodosia and Kerch are, so I don't know if it is better to say "immigrated ... to" or "migrated ... to." In other words, ones that were judgment calls, I skipped.

I think I started when I found the error on the Nash Bridges page and thought, "I wonder if this error occurs elsewhere?" In fact, Google reveals 900 or so such pages. I may make all the changes in time, but realistically I don't think I have the time or inclination to modify that many pages.

66.108.204.239 (talk) 21:39, 1 January 2008 (UTC)