Broad editing organization | More specific projects | ||||||
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Article improvements | Mental accretion | Phrases to watch | Templates | Character encoding | DKC organizing | Footnotes | Tooltips |
If my subpages inspire you to carry out an idea yourself or you have any questions or concerns, I'm interested in hearing about it! |
Sometimes I notice errors in articles that aren't dependent on the accuracy of the phrasing, but simply an issue of structural accuracy. This page collects phrases I notice. I am ultimately limited by Wikipedia's search: the search handles small phrases well, but can't account for context or conditional arrangements of phrases because the regex options in the search engine are so limited. AWB supports more regex options, but can't efficiently search because database dumps don't appear to contain an index (or at least one that AWB has access to). Perhaps I will download a database dump and index it in the future.
I currently use two labels in categorizing my phrasing concerns:
I would like to merge the phrase and search columns, but I haven't yet figured out a good way to translate regex searches containing brackets ([]
) into search links using {{sl}}.
Clarity | |||||
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Phrase | Query | # results | Explanation | Examples | Search notes |
"the fact that" | My old enemy. I've mellowed out a bit, but I avoid the phrase in my own writing. | ||||
"[am/are] of the opinion [that]" | Verbose; could be replaced by "thinks" (though the connotation differs slightly) | ||||
"by far" | Unnecessary qualifier; a bit non-neutral. | ||||
"in order to" | Often replaceable by "to" | ||||
"not unlikely" | "not unlikely" |
225 | "not" before any "un" word is questionable, because it's imprecise in its degree and a double negative. It usually is a weakened version of "likely". | ||
"had the effect of [verb]ing" | Replaceable by [verb]ed; the indirection by "effect" may sometimes indicate more nuance. There are possibly more broad queries like "[had/has] the effect" that may be worth investigating | ||||
"Also, " | Unencyclopedic tone to begin sentences. | ||||
NPOV | |||||
Phrase | Query | # results | Explanation | Examples | Search notes |
"to the maximum" | "to the maximum" insource:/to the maximum[^"\- ]/i |
104 | Informal tone. | 1 | The search is a representative sample of problematic use that minimizes false positives. The most useful filter is the inclusion of a space in the character class, which reduces the number of results tenfold. |
"in interesting" | insource:"in interesting" |
220 | |||
"in fact" | This does add meaning by contrasting with the previous statement, but it is a bit non-neutral. | ||||
"unprecedented" |