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Let's suppose that the word foo is almost always an incorrect spelling of fob, and that someone has added a typo-fixing rule to do the fix.
Current behaviour
If an article contains a link ] or ], then the typo-fixer has been coded to turn off that rule for the entire article. It won't change foo to fob in the body text of the article. Sometimes this makes sense, as the existence of a ] link is a sign that the word has a special meaning when used in the article. Sometimes this merely means that a typo goes unfixed - the link is itself a typo, possibly an unintended red link or a link to something in Category:Redirects from misspellings. As I understand it, AWB cannot efficiently discover whether each link is a red or blue link, an article or a redirect.
It seems very difficult to assess whether this is the best behaviour. It takes a sharp-eyed AWB user to notice that a foo has been left unchanged. Questions, then:
Does anyone have a feel for how many correct fixes are missed because of this behaviour?
Does anyone have a feel for how many incorrect fixes are avoided because of this behaviour?
Proposed change
I propose that a link to an image should never cause a typo-fixing rule to be turned off. Images are frequently uploaded with non-English names, or with typos in their names, or with names that don't conform to our picky hyphenation or capitalisation rules; and since image names aren't displayed in the articles there is no great incentive to rename them. I think, then, that the existence of a link to ] should not be taken as a sign that the word foo has a special meaning in the article, and that the "foo to fob" rule should be allowed to run normally.
Support - In what concerns Portuguese, names in images are most of the time misspelled (usually people do not use diacritics), and the bad collocation of Diacritic is one of the most common errors in pt.wikipedia. As AWB is to be operated by people (not bots), a think of two possible solutions:
Keep the feature (external links disable a Typo rule) but giving an Alert similar to 'sic tag/template - "Contains matching external links"
There is a related bug report here which I have verified in my sandbox - a typo-fixing rule is currently disabled if it matches an interwiki link. This looks dubious, as these links are in arbitrary non-English languages most of the time. I propose that an interwiki link should never cause a typo-fixing rule to be turned off. -- John of Reading (talk) 22:43, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Some doubts - As above, in what concerns Portuguese, most names in interwikis to foreign languages do not use diacritics, even if the name is Portuguese. In the other hand, if the article is about a foreign subject, the existence of the interwiki may prevent a correction of a False Positive. A 'balance' must be done, but I have no data to give an opinion.
rev 8834 Typo restriction that typo rule not applied if it matches a link target will apply only to wikilinks, not image/interwiki/category links. Rjwilmsi19:17, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Interesting! The report would be more useful, though, if it only included unpiped links where the wrong spelling is visible to the reader - like the three articles which link to Tennesseee. Both articles which link to Natural satelite do so through a piped link, so those don't need to be fixed. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:13, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
The change seems fine. Vowel sounds have an an before them, 'i' pronounced 'aɪ'. Why would it not be an i7, an i6, an i8, an iPhone, or an iPad? Regards, Sun Creator22:24, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
I undid my edit at 1960 Norwegian Football Cup and went to look at the rule to see how it could be tweaked. To my surprise, it's a very simple rule that does not try to distinguish "full time" used as a noun from "full-time" used as an adjective or adverb. My printed Concise Oxford makes this distinction, as does Collins (Onelook.com).
I have received a complaint from an Australian editor that "the Macquarie Dictionary allows for both with nee being listed first". Is this the death knell for our Typo rule? Christhe speller12:13, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
No no! Trust me: the Macquarie is not a good guide in these matters. And even if it were an accurate index of substandard Australianisms, it wouldn't matter. Please, let's continue to prefer née, which is internationally accepted and understood. (What next, phenomena and criteria are accepted as singular forms, because some dictionaries list them as such?)
Major British and dictionaries prefer née. Rationally.
There were only two cases of this particular misspelling in all of the millions of pages in en.wikipedia (both now fixed), and it is not a false positive, as it did not try to change a properly spelled word. It seems to me that it is not worth messing with the Typo rules to handle this extremely rare misspelling that might only pop up once every few years. The typo rules are not intended to catch every possible mistake, just somewhat common ones. As the first sentence of the Typo rules says, "These regular expressions find and fix common misspellings". At least the current rule brought the misspelling to your attention. Christhe speller13:57, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
Fixed with these edits. -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:55, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
