Hi everyone. For several years I have been copy-editing articles using the tools provided here and re-visiting accidently many times over. I recently noticed that when editing a page, the red squiggly line beneath accidently no longer appears. I noticed this for a few weeks now and decided to look it up. It just so happens that actually it is true -
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accidently says that it is a proper word "and it is sometimes cited as an error" albeit less common.
Eugene-elgato (
talk)
14:34, 29 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Help needed finding legacy punctuation like "--" "-->"
I'd like to fix typos like changing "--" to emdash, "-->" to → and similar changes in accordance with
WP:MOS
Can you help me with the wikipedia text search? It doesn't seem to find instances of punctuation characters properly.
Tonymetz💬21:28, 4 April 2024 (UTC)reply
You would need to use insource: but there are major problems. One is that it is inefficient, because it has to scan millions of pages, and the search will not complete unless limited by adding other search terms. Another is that it would mainly find <!-- HTML comments -->.
Certes (
talk)
21:53, 4 April 2024 (UTC)reply
A search
like this one works somewhat, timing out because of the issues Certes lists above. An editor would need to be very careful to inspect each instance of "-->" to see whether it should be converted to an arrow character, modified to be an HTML comment, converted to list markup, left alone because it is part of a quotation or title, or something else. I can't see automated find-and-replace providing valid replacements for the pages that turn up in these search results. Tread wisely. –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
22:21, 4 April 2024 (UTC)reply