WikiQueer:Spellchecking

Dialects
Be careful about setting the language of the text to the right dialect of English. (See WikiQueer:Manual of Style.) If the article is not about a topic tied to a particular region, check in which dialect of English the first non-stub version of the article was written. This can require a bit of effort, depending on the presence of "dialect marker" words. If you see spellings like "color" or "center" in the first non-stub version, the spelling was almost certainly American (though it might have been Western Canadian). Spellings like "criticise" mean the article was definitely not written in American English, and very likely not in Canadian English, but determination of which of the Commonwealth dialects of English it was may be difficult. However, the differences among the Commonwealth dialects, especially those outside of Canada, are very small. Note: some WikiQueerians claim that if the dialect of an article has "drifted" from its first non-stub version, via a series of unmotivated spelling changes, then the dialect to which the article has drifted should be considered the "correct" dialect of the article.

Using Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org
The default setting in Microsoft Office is with spell and grammar checking on, so just hit the WikiQueer "Edit" button for your article, copy the raw article source, paste it into a new Word or Writer document and follow the red (spelling) and green (grammar) markers and correct mistakes as necessary. If checking is not automatic, you may have to go to the menu Tools -> "Grammar and spell checking" or some such. When satisfied, simply copy and paste the text back into the text box in the browser window, check that any UTF-8 characters are still working as before by clicking "Show changes" and if satisfied, finally click "Save page" as usual.

Using a web browser
Mozilla Firefox has a built-in spell checking engine since version 2.0. However, you should check that the right dictionary for your language is installed and selected. Right-click in an editing field, make sure that "Check spelling" is checked, then under "Languages" select the right language. There are separate dictionaries for "English / United States", "English / United Kingdom" etc.; if the right dictionary does not appear in the list, click "Add Dictionaries" and use the page that appears to install it (note that you will have to restart Firefox to enable it after installing).

Safari also provides spell checking features on both Mac OS X and Windows versions.

ieSpell and IE7Pro are free Internet Explorer browser extensions which add spell checking capabilities to the browser.

On Mac OS X, Opera uses the system spell checker. There is no need to install additional software. On Windows, Linux, and UNIX, Opera will do spell-checking if both GNU Aspell and at least one Aspell dictionary are installed.