Thread:Project:Support desk/Improving the effectiveness of regular expressions against vandalism/reply (4)

Technical reasons? We already did -- it is impossible to make a dictionary sufficient enough to cover every possible word in every possible language, including every possible proper noun, intentional misspellings of words (e.g. "internet speak"), and code (among many other things). If such a dictionary was made, it would likely number in the millions of words and be impossible to scan every word of every submission for a match in the dictionary in a reasonable amount of time (especially of larger articles that average 20 KB of text or more).

This is way too limiting and even more arbitrary of a restriction than the current regex-based measures. Additionally, a sufficiently motivated vandal can and will get around any arbitrary restriction you impose, so in addition to not doing anything (except, I guess, making vandals vandalize pages using actual words), it harms the average user who may wish to type something that doesn't exist in the dictionary and finds that they are unable to do so ("I really wanted to write an article on Khenarthi's Roost, but it isn't in the dictionary so I can't!").