Ooo! I found one in my title. That should be “typos.”
From time to time, I’ll read a site and find a misspelling or typo. If it’s convenient (email address nearby, or they’re a friend of mine), I usually let the author know. As this has happened over the last year, I’m reminded of an idea that Matt Haughey had to let a trusted group edit his posts for errors. This seems like a widget that someone could add into extensible frameworks like Moveable Type and WordPress. A non-exhaustive search shows that nobody has worked this up yet.
Matt later expanded his idea to include letting anyone make edits. This seems like the natural progression and where typo-removal might be easiest. To avoid misuse, there would be a certain threshold, so that folks couldn’t make changes willy-nilly, rewriting entire posts. And there would have to be a way to revert changes… this is sounding more and more like a Wiki.
Like any software project, I can certainly see feature creep taking over this little widget. Anytime you give up even a tiny piece of control, it will probably be used differently than you imagined. For each nasty thing someone cooks up, there’s a piece of duct tape to make sure it never happens again. But how long can that dance go on? As I’m thinking through problems and their solutions, it’s moved from a simple little widget to a more involved solution to what wasn’t even that big of a pain in the first place.
The issues that arise out of this typo corrector are the same ones facing the many Wiki programmers. In general, I believe in people to do good. And I believe in the simple solution. However, wiki-izing the entire web would probably not comfort most people.
I’d love to come to some sort of conclusion, but I’m not sure there is one yet. Any ideas? If not, I suppose you can keep emailing me those “ttypos.”
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