Jump to content

Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Editing/Convert typographic replacement characters like straight apostrophes and quotation marks

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Convert typographic replacement characters like straight apostrophes and quotation marks

  • Problem: While many Wikipedias written in the Latin script have adopted the use of local quotation marks (usually distinct one for opening and closing) and typographic (curly) apostrophes instead of straight " and ' as well as proper em or en dashes instead of the hyphen-minus -, this has traditionally not happened on the English Wikipedia out of fear that it would be too complicated for contributors and that mixing styles would look unpleasant or unprofessional.
  • Who would benefit: Readers.
  • Proposed solution: Substitute ASCII replacement characters while editing.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: phabricator:T40724
  • Proposer: Crissov (talk) 11:04, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • The EN Wiki MOS has this footnote

Curly quotation marks and apostrophes are deprecated on the English Wikipedia because:

  • Consistency keeps searches predictable. Though most browsers do not distinguish between curly and straight marks, Internet Explorer still does (as of 2016), so that a search for Alzheimer's disease will fail to find Alzheimer’s disease and vice versa.
  • Straight quotation marks and apostrophes are easier to type reliably on most platforms.

Gbear605 (talk) 23:03, 20 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Which IMHO is a terrible thing. But except enwiki, indeed many projects would profit a lot from the feature.–XanonymusX (talk) 20:05, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It's not even language-specific, it's country-specific in the same language. Different country, different customs. Grüße vom Sänger ♫(Reden) 22:40, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting