Medium, Substack and Publishers: Let Readers Correct Typos and Mistakes

A proposal to enhance content quality through correction reporting

Summary

Ever found a typo while reading a cool Medium article? Yeah, we all have. But reporting it is a pain — comments are public, and there’s no easy way to message the author. I went the extra mile a couple times to inform the writer, to which they’ve always been grateful. This made me think, why not make it easy for readers to help improve content? I have a proposal: a simple “Correction” button. Highlight the text with the error, click the Correction button, submit and voila! See example mock-up below. The author receives the correction without the world knowing. No more ignoring mistakes — let’s make content quality better together! 🚀

Set the scene

You’re reading an engaging article on Medium. You spot a typo. Perhaps a leter is missing (yes, “letter” is misspelled intentionally). You consider informing the author but you convice yourself it’s just a small typo. No big deal. So you keep reading.

You come across a p̶h̶o̶t̶o̶ sentence that uses the wrong word. You know “photo” is incorrect because a photo does not contain words. When you try to inform the author, you realize there’s no easy way. Your options:

1. Comment the error. Comments will be viewed by everyone. You don’t want to embarrass the author so you avoid commenting. Especially if the mistake is small.
2. Reach out to the author. There’s no easy way to do this. Medium does not allow for messages. Unless you have the writer’s email because you’re subscribed to a newsletter, it’s difficult. And even then you would have to leave the article to send that email.

Both of these options are painful for both the user and the author. As a user, I don’t want to go through a large effort to report an error. As an author, I want to be able to view and make corrections easily, without my entire audience seeing the comment section filled with corrections. The reality is,

readers are forced to ignore errors they comes across in articles

Typos happen, trust me I get it

Before we continue, I completely understand typos happen. Dan Brotzel explained why we should be more understanding when we come across typos:

vast amounts of content are created these days by clever, funny, interesting and inspiring writers — many thousands of them on Medium — who do not have the luxury of a team of sub-editors to sense-check and proof-read their work. Without industrial levels of QA and fact-checking of the sort that only certain very high-end American magazines can aspire to, the occasional slip-up is an almost unavoidable by-product of any content creation process.

I agree with Dan. But that got me thinking. Why don’t we give Medium writers access to a team of people to proof-read their work? The readers.

Proposal: provide users with a one-click “Correction” option to report errors/typos.

I propose implementing a simple solution to address this common issue: a one-click “Correction” option. Readers can effortlessly report errors and typos, contributing to the overall improvement of content quality.

Here’s how it could work.

1) One-Click Correction Button

Introduce a “Correction” button that shows up when a user highlights text. Below is an mock-up illustration using one of my other articles. I purposefully introduced a typo in the article so you get the idea (“valu” instead of “value”). Currently, when you can highlight and/or tweet a text that you highlight with your cursor. Allowing users to also report an error would be seamless.

To report an error, click the button, type the correction, and press Submit. One highlight, one click, done. So many errors fixed, major boost to content quality.

2) Notify Author of Corrections

Authors receive notifications of each correction. They can choose to accept (make the change) or reject them. Most importantly, other readers don’t see the list of corrections. And people don’t type corrections in comments. Instead they use the right method. Writers are informed about potential mistakes, giving them the opportunity to review and correct errors without compromising the integrity of their work. This is what the author’s view may look like:

Is this really necessary?

You might wonder, is this really necessary? Typos aren’t a big deal. On the surface, I agree. Typos are not a major fire for Medium to put out. However, two points to consider:

1. Empowering users to fix typos is a low-effort feature to enrich content quality.
2. It’s not only typos that we’re trying to fix, but also errors in logic or references. For example, an article talking about gravity may accidentally read “all objects fall upwards”, when the writer meant to stay “downwards”. So yes, it can make a significant difference in content quality.

Bonus tip for writers: ChatGPT

I found that ChatGPT is great at detecting typos, errors, and logical inconsistencies. Give it a try like I did with this article:

No errors were found, but ChatGPT gave me some neat suggestions:

ChatGPT said I should break down longer sentences into shorter ones (#4). As a follow up, I asked it to point me to the sentences that need revision.

Your turn

What are your thoughts? Is this a good feature? Can we get Medium to work on it? Share this with someone who is in a position to implement this feature at Medium. Let me know if there’s someone I can surface this article to.