Follow-Up: LOC & Wikipedia Misspellings

This time, the LOC did send me a quick e-mail noting that they had changed the misspelled “Great Britian” in the record I found last Wednesday. I submitted the mistake form late that evening, and the e-mail I got was sent early Thursday morning, so that was pretty fast.

“Great Britian” and “Untied States” are common mis-typings/mis-spellings that were the sort of thing that a certain class of Wikipedia lurkers scour that site for and correct. But now Wikipedia has a “category” of entries called “Redirects from Misspellings”, so that if you search for “Great Britian” is sends you to the article on “Great Britain”. Of course, now this prevents folks from both finding instances where this mis-spelling is intentional, as in albums names, or in finding these mistaken spellings so that they can be corrected. Thinking about this for a bit, I realized a Google advance search limiting the domain to Wikipedia will still look for these misspellings, of which there are 103 instances of "Great Britian" and 78 instances of “Untied States” as of today (Some of these are in discussions and comments and not in the text of articles, as well as in at least one book with “Untied States” in the title and the above-referenced article to an album.)

Later I stumbled on the Wikipedia “Typo Team” that has volunteers who do this sort of thing regularly, and which also suggests using the Google advance search and other search techniques to find these types of errors.

The example above are, of course, more numerous than the misspellings you find in the Library of Congress Catalog, but those exists and aren’t hard to find. I turned up that one instance last week by browsing for subject headings starting with “Great Britian” but if you do a subject heading keyword searches for this and the other one, you get five and six mis-spellings:

"Untied States"


"Great Britian"


Might as well try some other possibilities - here’s one for:

“Soveit Union”:


Looking at some of the records from the above three searches, I saw that these were recent titles - all but one of them were published in either 2008 or this year. I asked the LOC guy who e-mailed me the acknowledgment and asked if they comb the recent records for such common mis-spellings and just hadn’t picked these up yet. He got back to me pretty quickly and confirmed this - they do check their records for stuff like this, and they get plenty of error reports from the catalogs, but he was nice and said they still appreciate the effort. I told him that this one would be my last and that I would stop after it:

“New Orlaens”
http://lccn.loc.gov/97520456

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Correcting Errors: LOC Wins

No surprise, I guess, but that was pretty fast. I didn't get an e-mail yet, but the catalog record at the Library of Congress I found yesterday has been corrected. No response yet about the contradictory Wikipedia articles.

So what other typos might be in the Library of Congress? In our catalog I used to occasionally find a few mis-spellings, like "Lousiana", so I tried a few terms in the subject headings at the LOC catalog. The second one I tried turned one up, and this time I made a screen capture of the LCCN permalink record (http://lccn.loc.gov/2009396253/):


I submitted another error report at the LOC. If I wasn't taking a four-day weekend, I would check back regularly to see exactly how long this takes. Can I do a Google alert on the LCCN permalink? How often does Google check for those? Oh, yeah, I haven't verified that Google alerts will actually do this: notify me when a page has changed. I tested it with something earlier today, and the page changed but i haven't received a notice. Will have to investigate further.
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Correcting Errors: Wikipedia and the Library of Congress

Errors on Wikipedia are not hard to find and errors in the Library of Congress catalog are, I guess, not unheard of, but I found one of both today and thought I would use the mechanisms for reporting errors in both and see which one was fixed first.

Of course, in Wikipedia, anyone can edit the entries and correct errors. And easily verified errors in objective facts are not as rampant as its detractors may think, especially in the most popular and widely-read articles. What I found was two related articles that contradict each other; the articles were relatively minor and the fact is a small point, but they don't jibe 100%. And since I don't know the correct answer, I posted a talk comment in both to see how long it would take until someone resolved the differences.

I may have heard of Southern Rock group Black Oak Arkansas and their singer James "Jim Dandy" Mangrum before I saw them mentioned on a documentary I watched over the weekend ("Van Halen: The Early Days"; the documentary pointed out that "Jim Dandy" Mangrum was a big influence on David Lee Roth's on-stage persona; I thought this was a good title to test Netflix's streaming movies for the first time - it works pretty good, its turns out, not that I would want to watch a lot of movies streaming to my computer).

The Wikipedia entries for them, of course, overlap considerably but the one for Mangrum says an early incarnation of Black Oak Arkansas:

"moved to New Orleans and recorded a Stax record that went nowhere."

But the entry for Black Oak Arkansas itself says they:

"moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1969 and signed a record deal with Stax Records. Their self-titled debut album, and their only album with Stax, was largely ignored by the populace."

So where was it, New Orleans or Memphis, where they recorded with Stax? Or did they sign the deal with Stax in Memphis but record the album in New Orleans? This may just be sloppy writing and not a contradiction. Either way, I posted a note in the discussion part of each entry asking for clarification.

The error in the Library of Congress catalog is just a typo. I was looking for some Latin America materials - from any country - for a faculty member and found this title:

Li´neas y criterios jurisprudenciales,Sala de lo Penal, 2005 / [coordinador, Ulices del Dios Guzma´n Canjura ; compilador, Mauricio Haim Luna].

With this subject heading:

Ccriminal law --El Salvador --Digests.

Yes, just a typo - with the extra "c" in criminal.

There's a form on the Library of Congress' catalog for reporting errors, so I entered the LCCN number for this record, put in my brief summary of this error, added my e-mail address, and submitted the message. The acknowledgment said it takes five days on average to respond to these error reports, so I'll keep an eye out for a response and see how long it takes. And I'll check back on the two Wikipedia entrees to see if anyone is monitoring changes to them on their watchlist (which include additions to the discussion pages) and will correct the discrepancy between them. Which will be corrected first?

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