Image via Wikipedia

The Cupertino Effect can occur when you accept the suggestion of a spellchecker program, which was attempting to assist you with a misspelled word (or what it “thinks” is a misspelling because it cannot find an exact match for the word in its dictionary). 

Although the suggestion (or in most cases, a list of possible words is suggested) is indeed spelled correctly, it might not be the word you were trying to spell, and in some cases, by accepting the suggestion, you create a contextually inappropriate result.

It’s called the “Cupertino” effect because with older programs the word “cooperation” was only listed in the spellchecking dictionary in hyphenated form (i.e., “co-operation”), making the spellchecker suggest “Cupertino” (i.e., the California city and home of the worldwide headquarters of Apple, Inc.,  thereby essentially guaranteeing it to be in all spellchecking dictionaries).

By accepting the suggestion of a spellchecker program (and if there’s only one suggested word listed, don’t we always accept it?), a sentence where we intended to write something like:

“Cooperation is vital to our mutual success.”

Becomes instead:

“Cupertino is vital to our mutual success.”

And then confusion ensues (or hilarity—or both).

Beyond being a data quality issue for unstructured data (e.g., documents, e-mail messages, blog posts, etc.), the Cupertino Effect reminded me of the accuracy versus context debate.

Via | SmartDataCollective