There is a huge problem in the face of E2: Duplicate content and people who can’t spell. Splattered across the nodegel are different versions of the same basic content, just spelled wrong. We see them all the time, and I have been trying to come up with a solution to it. Maybe there could be something easily done in code to fix this… It struck me the other day while using my friend Google… they have a great system for detecting misspellings, and finding the right content. Maybe we could do something similar.

My suggestion is this: create a new nodetype of, "e2pointer", that would contain the correct spelling for a common misspelling (such as potatoe => potato, etc.) When a user searches, look for an exact match to a pointer to that node. If so, display text as in “Are you looking for…”link node with correct spelling contained in the e2pointer”? and then display the other text items. (still allowing them to add the node if they wanted). I think it would slow people down from making mistakes with their write-ups, and keep newbies on the right track.

Whenever an editor / god-type kills a “see also” node, they could add an e2pointer for the misspelling. A good currently existing candidate for such a thing, for instance, would be: Mohammed, for instance (I am not picking on anyone, but using this as a live example). The correct spelling would be (AFAIK) Muhammed, but people noded it, and thus if a god doesn’t whack the nodeshell, someone may find and “rescue” it. I did this once with mosiac, as it should have been mosaic, and I too made the mistake (of the see also), until dannye set me on the path of light.

The search code and a few other things would need to be modified a bit to first search for an exact match of e2pointer, and then do the display for the rest of the matches. There would also have to be a mechanism to actually add these pointers to e2.

I am looking for comments on the suggestion, and whether the extra one look-up on following soft-links and the search functionality would lag the database terribly more. I think that after a few months of adding pointers, we could increase the flow and and make the editor’s job easier, and help noders make sure everything gets put where it belongs.

Note, I wish I could do a proof of concept, but I can add new nodetypes to e2.

Clarification: I would like these pointers/keywords/etc to be editor / god controlled, so we have a different situation other than nodeshells.

nate sez -- you wouldn't even need to do it through nodetypes (it would be another bazillion nodes, and fields like author_user, createtime, etc don't matter with "misspellings"). Create a setting that would contain (misspelled word => correct spelling) -- then something like this:

my ($nodename) = @_; (we're in the nodeName function)
my $MISSPELLINGS = getVars(getNode('misspellings','setting'));
$nodename = $$MISSPELLINGS{$nodename} if exists $$MISSPELLINGS{$nodename};

Note: Perlmonks does this exact same gig with keywords, (searching for sprintf will bring you to manpage: sprintf) so it's not a new hack, really. However, there is much potential for problems -- "common misspellings" are kind of a myth, and it wouldn't work at all for misspellings that are part of a title. A better gig might be to run ispell on the name and offer the user a suggestion before creating it.

jay sez back: Running ispell on the thing may not catch things like Chucky Cheese v. Chuck E. Cheese (todays ed logs). Maybe a combination of both? What kind of perf hit on the spell check thing is there?

anotherone says: nothing useful here, but I've got a great name for it:

"Firmlinks"

. (softlinks... hardlinks... eh, never mind)

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