User:Spelian

What is Spelian?
Spelian is a bot pending approval on the English Wikipedia. You can see its approval request here.

About Spelian
Spelian is a middle English word meaning 'to substitute for'. A derivative of the word is still used in modern English and is pronounced 'spelling'. Spelian is an automatic AWB based bot intended to trawl pages of Wikipedia semi-automatically making spelling corrections to common spelling errors.

Spelian will avoid:
 * Words less than 8 characters long.
 * The majority of nouns, for example playwright is almost always incorrectly spelt playright. However, several publishing companies exist under that name so it will be avoided.
 * It will never spell check anything other than main space pages.
 * It will aim to target adjectives, as they stand the highest chance of not being anything other than an erroneous misspelling.

Spelian will target:
 * Words that are persistently spelt incorrectly. For example pejorative is erroneously almost always spelt perjorative.
 * Words that have an extremely unlikely chance of being a company name or intentional misspelling. For example prominent is often incorrectly spelt prominant. It is highly unlikely that this misspelling would be intentional.

How are words chosen?
Spelian does not automatically choose words. That is why it is a semi-automatic bot. Using AWB the operator (WikipedianProlific) selects a word and does a Google search for it. 5 pages are then selected at random as a sample to ensure that the misspelling is not intentional. AWB is then set up and 'run' automatically allowing Spelian to automatically trawl through the offending articles correcting them. This process is much faster than a user manually checking every single page prior to editing. AWB will not make any automatic changes other than changing the spelling of the one word being run. This is because on occasion AWB can reformat or alter words, pages and links for the worse.

Although it is extremely unlikely, there is a minute possibility that eventually Spelian will alter a word is shouldn't have. In such events any corrections required will be made, leaving a message on this talk page will be sufficient and WikipedianProlific will revert the erroneous change. Should such an occurrence take place it is worth remembering that Spelian will have made many thousands of beneficial changes compared to the one erroneous change. Such is the case with most, if not all, bots.


 * Records of all lists run will be kept in the extremely unlikely event that a mass revert be required.