Where no Man can be Overchicked

In the land of Microsoft, where no man can be overchicked (a new word I also learned today), because the word simply does not exist.

Why are online dictionaries and search engines, like Google, so vastly superior in word and spelling updates to word processing programs like Microsoft Word? Chris Wilson of Slate magazine writes that it's because they have two different goals:

Google has to field queries as broad and varied as the Internet itself, so it needs a very large vocabulary in order to differentiate spelling mistakes from legitimate search terms. Word processors are much more conservative, limiting their lexicon to words that are definitely legitimate.

But Word is working to incorporate user data into its dictionary process. In a rather interesting paper two Microsoft gurus reflect on how to exploit collective knowledge via web based platforms, while retaining all important quality control.

Another classic quandary, methinks, for open source web based collective knowledge types (I affectionately called them the Wiki folk) and proprietary, quality control types (I like to think of them as the Old Guard). Prediction? Chris Wilson thinks,

Eventually, a spell-check based on Web data will be the way to go. Sure, we would see a few more naughty words and Dalmations in our Word documents, but the end product will be something that resembles the way people use language in the present day. Tally it up as one more victory for the pragmatists in the language wars.