Forum:Is there any guidance for common spelling errors or misconceptions?

Forums: Index > The Wizengamot > Is there any guidance for common spelling errors or misconceptions?

The official policy simply says to use British spelling. That's all well and good, but it assumes knowledge of the differences. There are many less well-known differences and rules. For instance, you may have noticed that I've been changing instances of 'practise' to 'practice'. Some editors here seem to be under the impression that 'practise' is UK English and 'practice' is US English and it's as simple as that. However, it is not (unfortunately). Although US English always uses 'practice', UK spelling actually distinguishes between the noun and verb forms of the word. 'practise' is only used for the verb form, and as a noun it's as wrong in UK English as it is in any other version of English. The {{British}} template also says that 'practise' is the verb spelling. Despite this, I have been reverted a few times by those who do not know about this UK English rule, and had to explain it to them. This word seems to be so common here that inserting notes on each instance of it explaining this rule is impractical. Is there any official (as in Harry Potter Wiki) guidance on common mistakes such as this, and if not, should there be some? (While I'm at it, I'll also point out that the c = noun and s = verb rule also applies to the word licence/license) AdamPlenty (talk) 16:13, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

There isn't any official guidance here on some of these specifics, although I can see adding a a short list for the most common terms. I have updated the bot to handle this distinction for practise/practice and license/licence so that should help make this correction automatically along with the other 1600+ US to UK term conversions it reviews. Thanks for clarifying this for those of us who stole the Queen's English and ran off into the wilderness ;) --Ironyak1 (talk) 18:49, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

Well actually this is going to be more tricky to automate than originally thought... Going to remove this from the bot's dictionary for now until a proper solution can be devised. It's up to human editors to fix for now. Sorry --Ironyak1 (talk) 18:55, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that your bot was changing all instances of 'practice' to 'practise' regardless of context :). AdamPlenty (talk) 18:56, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

Yep, unfortunately included in the UK to US English dictionary file widely available. The bot can still handle clear instances of the verb in the conjugated forms (-ing, -ed, etc) but the word just on its own requires some messy NLP context work. Hard to imagine that the rules for mongrel US English are actually more clear and consistent at times ;) Cheerio --Ironyak1 (talk) 19:03, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

For an informed review of the bot's approach, is this adjective correction correct? Thanks --Ironyak1 (talk) 20:19, May 5, 2020 (UTC)

I'd say no, it's not correct. It's the past tense of a verb. However, the Oxford Dictionary says 'licenced' is acceptable, though Wiktionary says it's non-standard. My UK English spellchecker on Firefox marks 'licenced' as wrong). AdamPlenty (talk) 20:27, May 5, 2020 (UTC)