Today is round one of the National Spelling Bee, where kids up to 16 years old put the rest of us to shame. The first round includes tricky words ranging from “tenor” to “onomatopoeia” to “rijsttafel.”
I’m reminded that I spend a chunk of my time correcting spelling for my many college-edumacated content publishers, and it highlights a balance with which we all struggle: central quality control vs. distributed publishing.
I don’t make many mistakes (that one up there is on purpose, smarty-pants), so if all the content comes through me, there’s a pretty good chance it’ll be clean before it hits critical eyeballs. On the other hand, that’s a significant bottleneck, and a lot of proofing to do.
A brief aside: The Web is still a wild West, filled with hoaxes and charlatans as well as valid information and services. Visitors to your pages consciously or unconsciously pick up clues as to the validity of your site — and without exception, they relate their impressions to the entire site and to the quality of your organization. Chief among these clues is accuracy: an out-of-date page or error sends a warning to the visitor. Users’ tolerance for errors varies, but because they are inductively applied, even one can be significant.
I’m sorry to say I don’t have absolute answers to this problem. 1) I encourage all my content publishers to use the built-in spell checker. 2) I monitor changed pages, spot-checking for errors and following up with publishers that are sloppy. 3) I reserve publishing control over some of the most-visited pages so that I can preview them and correct as needed.
Maybe I should hire a kid. Anyway, all this pontificating has made me hungry, so I’m off to get a bowl of rijsttafel.
