1

The Spellchecker Tool brings up protected pages to correct spelling on. For example, it came up on “ How to Deal with the Coronavirus Outbreak: Your Most Common Questions Answered ”, which is fully protected. Here is a screenshot:

Screenshot_2021-02-20 Spell Checker - wikiHow
Screenshot_2021-02-20 Spell Checker - wikiHow 1349×626 61 KB

However, the Quick Edit on this tool does detect page protection, and you can’t edit the article through it.

3 Likes
2

I believe for the most part tools that use the MediaWiki API are unable to edit pages that you are unable to edit them, and if you try to you may get an error or no edit may happen. For example, the article creator.

Whether the spellcheck tool is exhibiting page protection bypass is something that only wikiHow staff can tell.

3

Hopefully it won’t allow edits to protected pages, but I have seen tools that do not use the MediaWiki API. For example, edits from the Article Greenhouses don’t go through the Abuse Filter, which should not be possible. So it does appear that some tools do not edit pages in a standard way, so I just wanted to file this report just in case.

And even if it doesn’t allow edits to protected pages, I think that it should still filter them out.

1 Like
4

Thanks R2, I’ll see if we can update the tool so it doesn’t pull in protected pages.

1 Like