• Project description

LanguageTool is an extension for VisualEditor which enables language proofing support in over thirty languages.
Before this tool, VisualEditor relied on browser’s native spelling and grammar checking tools.
LanguageTool in itself is an open source spelling and grammar proofing software created and maintained by Daniel Naber. This extension is an integration of the tool into VisualEditor.

To use the tool, you have to enter the editing mode via VisualEditor. Go to Insert > LanguageTool.
This opens a dialog box which looks something like this :-

As soon as you start the tool, the errors in the editing area are highlighted. You can scroll through the errors using the two buttons in the dialog box (next and previous) or you can click on the highlighted error itself.
When a highlighted error is focused upon, using either the next and previous button or by clicking, the description of the error is displayed in the upper text-input-widget. The suggestions for replacements, if any, are displayed in the lower drop-down widget. This drop down widget also has text-input enabled. Once you either select the replacement you deem suitable or enter a replacement of your own, you have to click the replace button. This replaces the focused error with the replacement selected and removes the highlight from that error.
The rest of the errors remain as they are.
If you want to perform the check again, you have to click the check button in the dialog box.
Once you are satisfied with all the replacements and corrections, you can dispose the dialog box by clicking the done button. This removes all highlights in the editing area.

• Missing features/known bugs

This extension has some bugs as of now and we are in the process of fixing them.
One of the bugs is that when the dialog box is closed using the done button and then reopened again later, the initial description and suggestions in the dialog are the ones from the previous check and they are updated only when you focus on a new highlighted error.

Another bug is that the tool does not work very well with hyperlinks that spawn more than one line. It throws a lot of whitespace errors.

The drop down also opens by default once you start the tool.

There are some features missing. For instance, the tool right now extracts the language for the check to be performed from the page itself and hence will not work for articles which have words or pieces of text from different languages. We mean to implement this very soon.

Another missing feature is that the replacement should happen as soon as the user selects an suggestion, thus saving him/her one more click.

We also mean to enable the check every time the text on the page is updated so that the user does not have to click the check button after every update.

• Demo server link

If you want to try out this tool, here is a demo server : http://testinstance.wmflabs.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page?veaction=edit

You can create new pages, introduce more errors and see for yourself how it works. Please do let us know if and when you find more bugs.

• Resource links

Gerrit : https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/admin/projects/mediawiki/extensions/LanguageTool
Extension wiki : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LanguageTool

This is where the LanguageTool server is hosted as of now : http://tools.wmflabs.org/languageproofing/
This will be moved to Labs soon.