Anna
1
We all know the Good Ol’ Spellchecker has become more “ol’” than “good,” as of late. Several bugs have been recurring despite fixes, and the Proposed Spellchecker Whitelist backlog has been so high that many acceptable words haven’t been getting through to the actual whitelist. But spellchecking is a great way to help out on wikiHow - it not only takes care of those spelling errors, but also gives people a chance to make other improvements as they move through the queue. Correcting spelling errors can also be a great way for folks who aren’t yet wikitext-savvy to help out. Learning from your bug reports and feedback about the first incarnation of the spellchecker tool, @Jordansmall
has taken a leap in creating Spellchecker 2.0, with a more intuitive and navigable design. It’s going to be launching soon, so here’s a sneak peak! Here’s an idea of what it’ll look like (although Jordan may be making some more tweaks before launch):
The Spellchecker will go word by word, showing you a snippet of the article with the word in context (with the whole article available for review, below). There’ll be a simpler set of actions available: fixing the word, skipping it, or confirming that it’s a-okay. We’re doing away with the Proposed Whitelist, and words will now be added to the actual whitelist after 5 votes that they’re correct (admin votes count as 2, and these numbers might be adjusted later on, if the results don’t look accurate, or if the threshold is too high). There is also an option to “Quick Edit” the whole article, if you want to make broader improvements. When you do this, it’ll be just like Quick Edit from Recent Changes Patrol – you can make and publish any changes on the spot, in a small window. You will then still be asked to click yes/no/skip for the given highlighted words in the article, before moving on. This is so that if your answer is “no,” the word can be added to the whitelist to apply to future articles, too (making the whole system smarter over time!). If you’ve already removed that word from the article in your Quick Edit, your vote there won’t have any impact on the article itself - just the whitelist for future reference. In anticipation of this roll-out, the old Spellchecker will be going offline shortly. Jordan will be making some necessary changes to the data to get the improved tool ready before launch. After that - sometime in the next few days - Spellchecker 2.0 will be open for business, and we’d love to hear what you think! No system is perfect, and like with any tool, I’m sure there will be some bugs to iron out here, so let us know what you see. Hopefully overall it’ll be a smoother system than the old version! I gave it a go in testing, and have to say, it was a pretty fun to make helpful changes
That will be soooo great!!! I know with the current Spell Checker, it thinks that certain words with accents such as café or cliché (some people prefer the English spelling as well). Sounds really good!!!
Hailey
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Thanks for the update. The other spellchecker had some bugs that gave me a hard time using the tool.
system
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Once again, Jordan Small is my hero, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn another wikiHero (I wouldn’t call Anna’s name) is behind the push to some degree.
system
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BR - you’re my RC Patrol hero!
system
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Awesome news! But if the Spellchecker deals with each word individually, won’t there be a much larger backlog?
Anna
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@Mrappbrain
- the number on the Dashboard tile may well change, but the amount of editing work required is still the same (think of it as the number of words that need fixing - that doesn’t change, even if the count changes based on the new tool’s approach to spelling errors). I think making the edits is, if anything, faster and easier with 2.0, since you can focus on specific word changes (unless you want to do a full edit through “Quick Edit”). Between that and removing the big proposed whitelist backlog, I think we might actually bite into the queue more this way – and I’m cautiously optimistic that spellchecker fixes will be, overall, more helpful, since the more straight-forward UI will hopefully stop less experienced Spellcheckers from editing words that don’t need fixing (like many do now). Of course, we’ll have to see how it works when it’s out in the “real world,” but that’s my hope!
Hinni
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It looks awesome. Although I rarely use the spellchecker I might be tempted back to it
IamSH
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Does it fix the problem of appearing inside the article, which is used to make red background of misspelled word?
Anna
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It should, @IamSH
! We’re hoping to have eliminated a lot of the major issues with the older spellchecker - a few issues will likely still remain, but it should be an improvement. Anyway, nothing will tell like real life use once it launches! So once it’s out and you can actually give it a go, please let us know if you see things that might need addressing
IamSH
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@Anna
Not a problem. Let’s see what SpellChecker brings in v2.0.
Great job, engineers! v2.0 is a great improvement from the previous one.
Anna
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Ok, Spell Checker is up! Test away, and let us know if you see anything odd come up! Also keep in mind that going to Version 2.0 required a re-haul of the whitelist, so you’ll see some “obvious” words pop up at first, but the whitelist processes each night, so once there have been a few votes saying, “Yep that’s okay,” those easy peasy ones should go away
system
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Yeah, I’ve found myself tempted to press “No It’s Correct” through articles with lots of words that aren’t incorrect (like an article about saying stuff in Japanese) and if I go too fast I’ll accidentally say that a misspelled word is correct. Watch out for that! Ideally the tool will get smarter over time as we give it feedback on what’s correctly spelled and what isn’t
It seems really nice! But the spell checker thinks that the word online is incorrect!
Anna
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@LeahlovesGod
Haha, yea, I know Leah - pretty silly right now, with an empty whitelist! But the tool will get a *lot* smarter as people vote, and words get whitelisted. Jordan is also ironing out when to have the tool refresh the articles in the queue for review. So bear with us a little, and it’ll get there
From what I have seen, the tool seems to be a marked improvement over the previous version.
I commend @Jordansmall
on some excellent implementation.
- The tool seems sort of laggy, but it might be my system more than anything.
- I miss the “skip article” button,though. I would rather pass a Starcraft article on to an avid player rather than Google all the creatures, places, and weapons. I must confess I skipped How to Say Russian in Russian
by reloading my webpage for fear I would be in that article for days.
- Is there a number of corrections within one article that moves you on to the next article? I fear that more than five similar look-ups might cause some/many to leave the tool.
Are you saying the old whitelist was not ported over, @Anna
?
Anna
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Yep, they’re working on the bit of lagginess at the moment - hopefully that’ll improve! I can see what you mean about skipping the whole article; most only have a word or two, so hitting skip (“I’m not sure”) on a couple of words there should get you through quickly, but I’ll pass the suggestion on. Reloading is probably a good way to go as things stand now, though! For any given article, I believe it just takes you through all the potential errors, since fixing them all would be ideal in terms of getting the article in good shape. I haven’t found that held me up or made me want to stop, but it’s a good thought - that’s something we can keep an eye on by looking at the logs and outcomesUnfortunately, the old whitelist was woefully incomplete because most of the words were sitting in the proposed whitelist (it had a backlog of thousands), so if we’d been able to port that over we would still be running into most of the same words. But the new system and old system treat words differently, so a mostly fresh start was the way to go, engineering-wise – otherwise we’d run into some of the same errors and bugs we had before. The whitelist is already filling up, even from today, though, so I think this system will build us up a much smarter Spellchecker whitelist much more quickly!
I would hope that the articles would get fixed nearly as fast if they were sliced into bite-size pieces and doled out to several spellchecker app users. I would think the issue here would be engineering time it might take to implement the logistics of segmenting an article for the purposes of the spell-checker. It probably should only be considered for those articles with ten or more instances of potential misspellings. I know this concept is anti-KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly).
