This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 | Archive 20 | → | Archive 25 |
The second half of this archived discussion on quotation marks is in
Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_19.
Can someone explain to me why the MoS states that straight quotation marks be used at all? They are clearly typographically incorrect, visually inferior, and the only reason they exist at all is because of ASCII (that sub‐standard blight inflicted upon computing in ages long since past). The MoS gives the reasons for this as for “uniformity and to avoid complications”. Now I must disagree with both of these – articles can uniformly use correct quotes, and doing so introduces no complications whatsoever. So both of the cited reasons are quite clearly invalid. Unless someone can give indisputable reasons for using them, I propose that the quotes section be amended and brought kicking and screaming into the 1980s. Nicholas 8 July 2005 12:10 (UTC)
Almost all articles use straight quotation marks, they are easy to see, and easiest to write in the edit boxes. Why make life more complicated than this? jguk 8 July 2005 17:37 (UTC)
It seems to me that you are all correct. Straight quotes are easier to type in (a key feature for wiki-markup), but are rendered incorrectly. The obvious solution therefore would be for the Mediawiki software to automatically identify quote pairs, and translate them to the correct unicode characters when rendering the page. MS Word already does this, so it can't be impossible. There could also be an option to disable this in the user preferences if you don't like it. The important point is that very few users are going to have keyboards with keys devoted to all the typographic variants of quote marks, so they should not be allowed in the wikitext. - Aya 42 T C 19:47, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
Agreed that automagically changing straight quotes to directional (à la MS Word) is fraught with peril. But explicitly encoding directional quotes and optionally converting them back to straight (for display, if the browser prefers them that way) at some point along the line is an almost ideal solution, as long as they're encoded portably, and this is essentially what is advocated by Help:Special_characters#Typeset-style_Punctuation. It's significant to the debate, I think, that the Help page rather directly contradicts this MoS entry in this regard, in that it essentially condones the directional quotes. I had already (before discovering this discussion) inserted cross-references so that readers will be aware of both pieces of advice. I propose changing the MoS text to
Steve Summit 14:25, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
I started this debate some weeks ago on a separate page. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (Quotation marks and apostrophes). From what I can see, there is absolutely no reason to keep the existing rule about forbidding curlies. The rule itself was adopted long ago without any discussion, and was based on a technological restriction. The restriction is now gone, so the rule needs to be reevalutated. The current debate shows that today there is no consensus at all behind that rule, so if we follow the way we usually adopt in such case, the normative restriction in the MoS has to go the way of the Dodo—same reasoning as with dashes, or UK/US spelling, or whatever. Note also that no other Wikipedia I know of needs a rule about what quotation marks editors should use, and they all work fine. Arbor 15:49, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Clearly we don't have a consensus here, so I think we oughta do the NPOV thang and address both opinions. Here's my attempt. What do you think? (Note that I have also resurrected -- and revised -- the paragraph on Microsoft Word, which User:Crissov had deleted at 15:36 on 22 July 2005.)
Use of quotation marks and apostrophes
Single and double quotation marks (and to some extent apostrophes) can be entered in two different styles: the "straight" or nondirectional versions ' and ", and the "typographical" or directional variants ‘ ’ and “ ”. Both styles are in current use on the English Wikipedia; there is not currently a consensus mandating conversion to a single consistent usage.
For simplicity and to avoid certain complications, many editors of the English Wikipedia prefer to use the straight variants. However, Help:Special characters (which is a copy of the mediawiki-wide m:Help:Special characters) says of the directional quotes that they "maintain data integrity even on those machines that may not display them correctly" and that "it should be considered safe to use [them] unless proper display on old software is critical."
Therefore, our best current advice is similar to that for British versus American spelling: When entering new text, it is permissible to use either quoting style, but you should not edit existing text merely to change from one quoting style to another. When you do enter or edit any directional quotes, be careful to encode them correctly and portably; see Help:Special_characters.
There are two situations in which more definitive advice can be given. The fancier, directional quotes (which are not simple ASCII characters) can cause problems in article titles, since Wikipedia uses exact matches for link text and default searches. So the simpler, straight, ASCII quote characters ' and " should be used in article titles. Also, in contractions and possessives, there is nothing to be gained by using a right-hand directional single quote ’ instead of a plain apostrophe, and in those cases plain apostrophes (which are identical to straight single quotes) are preferred.
Be careful if you are pasting text to or from a word processor such as Microsoft Word, since doing so can introduce unintended or nonportable directional quotes. It is recommended that you turn off the "smart quotes" setting in your word processor (in recent versions of Word it is is in the "Autoedit" settings, called "AutoEdit during typing"). If you do permit your word processor to insert directional quotes, make sure they are rendered in your submitted article as portable HTML entities, not as OS-specific extended characters (see Help:Special_characters).
Do not use acute and grave accents or backticks (´ `) as quote characters.
Steve Summit 01:48, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Steve, thank you for doing something constructive. My comments are as follows
In most cases, the preferred apostrophe character is the punctuation apostrophe (distinguished as typographic, or curly apostrophe).
To repeat a slogan: Wikipedia is Not a Typewriter. Arbor 08:50, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Let's see if I can abstract all of this into a slightly edited version of Steve's proposal.
Quotation marks and apostrophes: straight or curly?
Single and double quotation marks and apostrophes can be entered in two different styles: the "straight", "typewriter", or nondirectional versions ' and ", and the "typographical", "curly", or directional variants ‘ ’ and “ ”.
Both styles are in use on the English Wikipedia; there is no consensus mandating conversion to a single consistent usage. Our best current advice is similar to that for British versus American spelling: When entering new text, it is permissible to use either quoting style, but you should not edit existing text merely to change from one quoting style to another. When you do enter or edit any directional quotes, be careful to encode them correctly and portably; see Help:Special_characters.
If you want to enter straight quotes, be careful if you are pasting text to or from a word processor such as Microsoft Word, since doing so can introduce unintended or nonportable directional quotes. It is recommended that you turn off the "smart quotes" setting in your word processor (in recent versions of Word it is is in the "Autoedit" settings, called "AutoEdit during typing").
Do not use acute and grave accents or backticks (´ `) as quote characters.
Note that I have removed quite a bit Steve's proposal, and was probably overzealous in doing so. Please put stuff back in. Especially, I have removed any attempt at explaining the reasons behind preferring one variant or the other; I think the MoS should give advice, not invite debate (that's what the talk page is for). Maybe I'm wrong, in that case Steve had good and short suggestions as to how this could be phrased.
I am very unsure about what advice we want to give about encodings. I think the best idea is just to maintain a link to Help:Special characters, which discusses the issue and would be the best place to keep up to date. I repeat may claim that neither French nor German Wikipedia have anything about this in their MoS, so I boldly assume that there really isn't a problem and the MoS shouldn't scare the user. But I may be underestimating the problem. Arbor 09:25, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I object to this change in toto -- I think the comments above show no consensus to permit the use of non-straight quote marks, and i think the MoS should continue to recomend that only straight quotation marks be used at this time. I don't see the above discussion as establishing a consensus broad enough to justify a change to an existing MoS provision. Please revert the change recently made to the Mos pending further discussion. DES (talk) 21:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
I agree with DES here. When wholesale changes to the MOS are made over the strong objections of many and there is not even a majority in favor, the best response may be a revert. And here there are strong objections because of what is lost by these changes. Smart quotes just don't work the same way on my Linux editors the same way they do on Microsoft Windows products. Smart quotes break things and make it harder for other editors. I wish people would understand that. As for the logical quote style, that has been raised and discussed at length. The longstanding guidance is prefered because it preserves exactly what is quoted: no more, no less. Jonathunder 15:18, 2005 August 9 (UTC)
in my view, this is not only a question of typography. It is also a question of parseability (aka 'semantic wikipedia'). I. e. while I hate the curly quotes, I think that quotes, beginning and end, should be formatted so that they are easily recognized by a parser. The ideal thing would be a {{quote|blah blah}} template. Typographical issues then go to the template (they can even be customized via CSS). dab (ᛏ) 18:06, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
We have debated this for 3 months now. There is obviously no consensus to use straight quotes only (nor, for that matter, to use only curlies). So we have fooled around with a paragraph to reflect this and then copied it to the MOS page. But User:Jonathunder and User:CDThieme have reverted this to the old version with its blanked prohibition against curlies.
Let me assume good faith here and ask both of you:
I cannnot see how anybody could answer anything else but ‘no’ to the first and ‘yes’ to the second. But clearly I am missing something. Are you making—implicitly or explicitly—an argument ad historiam along the lines of ‘rules persist until there is consensus to abandon them’? From that perspective your behaviour makes sense; but as far as I understand that’s really bad wiki and not how things are normally handled at Wikipedia (or MOS for that matter).
Note that I am not asking a question about straight quotes versus curlies (there has been enough time for that, and I think every argument has been made). I am asking a question about how you think the MOS should work when there is no consensus. Arbor 06:53, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
The people who really want those curly smart quotes keep ignoring the fact that not everybody uses the same software they do, and that these abombinable smart quotes are a huge pain for some people. It seems like some people just don't care about making more work for others. But if they keep ignoring the objections and keep trying to force a change through, they will be reverted. CDThieme 13:41, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Aside from one person who says curly, or smart quotes look better on whatever software system he or she prefers, and one person who is writing a lot about the process of concensus, there already seems to be a consensus of nearly everyone else who has commented or edited this section says the guidance should stay because of how it affects many editors, and how it varies in look from reader to reader. On many systems, to many readers, curly quotes are downright ugly. For many editors, smart quotes are broken. There seems to be a consensus about this, unless consensus means unaminity. I disagree that it does. Jonathunder 18:15, 2005 August 11 (UTC)
OK, first of all, this is how the Carlito's Way article looks on my browser:
They... look like straight quotes anyway.
Second: Suppose I want to edit this article, I take the first sentence:
In 1975, Judge Torres wrote “Carlito’s Way” and its sequel “After Hours”, |
...and somehow I cut the quotes off of the movie's title. When I go to put them back, I can't type-in curly quotes, (A point I have made before [1]), so I type them in straight:
In 1975, Judge Torres wrote "Carlito’s Way" and its sequel “After Hours”, |
Question: For those of you who can see the difference, is it ugly? Not the straight quotes themselves, but the fact that both types are used in the same article? Because if it is, what you're proposing would require me to replace all the quotes in an article to straight quotes any time I use straight quotes anywhere. Ravenswood 23:10, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
This archived discussion on quotation marks continues on Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_19 >>
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 | Archive 20 | → | Archive 25 |
The second half of this archived discussion on quotation marks is in
Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_19.
Can someone explain to me why the MoS states that straight quotation marks be used at all? They are clearly typographically incorrect, visually inferior, and the only reason they exist at all is because of ASCII (that sub‐standard blight inflicted upon computing in ages long since past). The MoS gives the reasons for this as for “uniformity and to avoid complications”. Now I must disagree with both of these – articles can uniformly use correct quotes, and doing so introduces no complications whatsoever. So both of the cited reasons are quite clearly invalid. Unless someone can give indisputable reasons for using them, I propose that the quotes section be amended and brought kicking and screaming into the 1980s. Nicholas 8 July 2005 12:10 (UTC)
Almost all articles use straight quotation marks, they are easy to see, and easiest to write in the edit boxes. Why make life more complicated than this? jguk 8 July 2005 17:37 (UTC)
It seems to me that you are all correct. Straight quotes are easier to type in (a key feature for wiki-markup), but are rendered incorrectly. The obvious solution therefore would be for the Mediawiki software to automatically identify quote pairs, and translate them to the correct unicode characters when rendering the page. MS Word already does this, so it can't be impossible. There could also be an option to disable this in the user preferences if you don't like it. The important point is that very few users are going to have keyboards with keys devoted to all the typographic variants of quote marks, so they should not be allowed in the wikitext. - Aya 42 T C 19:47, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
Agreed that automagically changing straight quotes to directional (à la MS Word) is fraught with peril. But explicitly encoding directional quotes and optionally converting them back to straight (for display, if the browser prefers them that way) at some point along the line is an almost ideal solution, as long as they're encoded portably, and this is essentially what is advocated by Help:Special_characters#Typeset-style_Punctuation. It's significant to the debate, I think, that the Help page rather directly contradicts this MoS entry in this regard, in that it essentially condones the directional quotes. I had already (before discovering this discussion) inserted cross-references so that readers will be aware of both pieces of advice. I propose changing the MoS text to
Steve Summit 14:25, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
I started this debate some weeks ago on a separate page. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (Quotation marks and apostrophes). From what I can see, there is absolutely no reason to keep the existing rule about forbidding curlies. The rule itself was adopted long ago without any discussion, and was based on a technological restriction. The restriction is now gone, so the rule needs to be reevalutated. The current debate shows that today there is no consensus at all behind that rule, so if we follow the way we usually adopt in such case, the normative restriction in the MoS has to go the way of the Dodo—same reasoning as with dashes, or UK/US spelling, or whatever. Note also that no other Wikipedia I know of needs a rule about what quotation marks editors should use, and they all work fine. Arbor 15:49, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Clearly we don't have a consensus here, so I think we oughta do the NPOV thang and address both opinions. Here's my attempt. What do you think? (Note that I have also resurrected -- and revised -- the paragraph on Microsoft Word, which User:Crissov had deleted at 15:36 on 22 July 2005.)
Use of quotation marks and apostrophes
Single and double quotation marks (and to some extent apostrophes) can be entered in two different styles: the "straight" or nondirectional versions ' and ", and the "typographical" or directional variants ‘ ’ and “ ”. Both styles are in current use on the English Wikipedia; there is not currently a consensus mandating conversion to a single consistent usage.
For simplicity and to avoid certain complications, many editors of the English Wikipedia prefer to use the straight variants. However, Help:Special characters (which is a copy of the mediawiki-wide m:Help:Special characters) says of the directional quotes that they "maintain data integrity even on those machines that may not display them correctly" and that "it should be considered safe to use [them] unless proper display on old software is critical."
Therefore, our best current advice is similar to that for British versus American spelling: When entering new text, it is permissible to use either quoting style, but you should not edit existing text merely to change from one quoting style to another. When you do enter or edit any directional quotes, be careful to encode them correctly and portably; see Help:Special_characters.
There are two situations in which more definitive advice can be given. The fancier, directional quotes (which are not simple ASCII characters) can cause problems in article titles, since Wikipedia uses exact matches for link text and default searches. So the simpler, straight, ASCII quote characters ' and " should be used in article titles. Also, in contractions and possessives, there is nothing to be gained by using a right-hand directional single quote ’ instead of a plain apostrophe, and in those cases plain apostrophes (which are identical to straight single quotes) are preferred.
Be careful if you are pasting text to or from a word processor such as Microsoft Word, since doing so can introduce unintended or nonportable directional quotes. It is recommended that you turn off the "smart quotes" setting in your word processor (in recent versions of Word it is is in the "Autoedit" settings, called "AutoEdit during typing"). If you do permit your word processor to insert directional quotes, make sure they are rendered in your submitted article as portable HTML entities, not as OS-specific extended characters (see Help:Special_characters).
Do not use acute and grave accents or backticks (´ `) as quote characters.
Steve Summit 01:48, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Steve, thank you for doing something constructive. My comments are as follows
In most cases, the preferred apostrophe character is the punctuation apostrophe (distinguished as typographic, or curly apostrophe).
To repeat a slogan: Wikipedia is Not a Typewriter. Arbor 08:50, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Let's see if I can abstract all of this into a slightly edited version of Steve's proposal.
Quotation marks and apostrophes: straight or curly?
Single and double quotation marks and apostrophes can be entered in two different styles: the "straight", "typewriter", or nondirectional versions ' and ", and the "typographical", "curly", or directional variants ‘ ’ and “ ”.
Both styles are in use on the English Wikipedia; there is no consensus mandating conversion to a single consistent usage. Our best current advice is similar to that for British versus American spelling: When entering new text, it is permissible to use either quoting style, but you should not edit existing text merely to change from one quoting style to another. When you do enter or edit any directional quotes, be careful to encode them correctly and portably; see Help:Special_characters.
If you want to enter straight quotes, be careful if you are pasting text to or from a word processor such as Microsoft Word, since doing so can introduce unintended or nonportable directional quotes. It is recommended that you turn off the "smart quotes" setting in your word processor (in recent versions of Word it is is in the "Autoedit" settings, called "AutoEdit during typing").
Do not use acute and grave accents or backticks (´ `) as quote characters.
Note that I have removed quite a bit Steve's proposal, and was probably overzealous in doing so. Please put stuff back in. Especially, I have removed any attempt at explaining the reasons behind preferring one variant or the other; I think the MoS should give advice, not invite debate (that's what the talk page is for). Maybe I'm wrong, in that case Steve had good and short suggestions as to how this could be phrased.
I am very unsure about what advice we want to give about encodings. I think the best idea is just to maintain a link to Help:Special characters, which discusses the issue and would be the best place to keep up to date. I repeat may claim that neither French nor German Wikipedia have anything about this in their MoS, so I boldly assume that there really isn't a problem and the MoS shouldn't scare the user. But I may be underestimating the problem. Arbor 09:25, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I object to this change in toto -- I think the comments above show no consensus to permit the use of non-straight quote marks, and i think the MoS should continue to recomend that only straight quotation marks be used at this time. I don't see the above discussion as establishing a consensus broad enough to justify a change to an existing MoS provision. Please revert the change recently made to the Mos pending further discussion. DES (talk) 21:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
I agree with DES here. When wholesale changes to the MOS are made over the strong objections of many and there is not even a majority in favor, the best response may be a revert. And here there are strong objections because of what is lost by these changes. Smart quotes just don't work the same way on my Linux editors the same way they do on Microsoft Windows products. Smart quotes break things and make it harder for other editors. I wish people would understand that. As for the logical quote style, that has been raised and discussed at length. The longstanding guidance is prefered because it preserves exactly what is quoted: no more, no less. Jonathunder 15:18, 2005 August 9 (UTC)
in my view, this is not only a question of typography. It is also a question of parseability (aka 'semantic wikipedia'). I. e. while I hate the curly quotes, I think that quotes, beginning and end, should be formatted so that they are easily recognized by a parser. The ideal thing would be a {{quote|blah blah}} template. Typographical issues then go to the template (they can even be customized via CSS). dab (ᛏ) 18:06, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
We have debated this for 3 months now. There is obviously no consensus to use straight quotes only (nor, for that matter, to use only curlies). So we have fooled around with a paragraph to reflect this and then copied it to the MOS page. But User:Jonathunder and User:CDThieme have reverted this to the old version with its blanked prohibition against curlies.
Let me assume good faith here and ask both of you:
I cannnot see how anybody could answer anything else but ‘no’ to the first and ‘yes’ to the second. But clearly I am missing something. Are you making—implicitly or explicitly—an argument ad historiam along the lines of ‘rules persist until there is consensus to abandon them’? From that perspective your behaviour makes sense; but as far as I understand that’s really bad wiki and not how things are normally handled at Wikipedia (or MOS for that matter).
Note that I am not asking a question about straight quotes versus curlies (there has been enough time for that, and I think every argument has been made). I am asking a question about how you think the MOS should work when there is no consensus. Arbor 06:53, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
The people who really want those curly smart quotes keep ignoring the fact that not everybody uses the same software they do, and that these abombinable smart quotes are a huge pain for some people. It seems like some people just don't care about making more work for others. But if they keep ignoring the objections and keep trying to force a change through, they will be reverted. CDThieme 13:41, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Aside from one person who says curly, or smart quotes look better on whatever software system he or she prefers, and one person who is writing a lot about the process of concensus, there already seems to be a consensus of nearly everyone else who has commented or edited this section says the guidance should stay because of how it affects many editors, and how it varies in look from reader to reader. On many systems, to many readers, curly quotes are downright ugly. For many editors, smart quotes are broken. There seems to be a consensus about this, unless consensus means unaminity. I disagree that it does. Jonathunder 18:15, 2005 August 11 (UTC)
OK, first of all, this is how the Carlito's Way article looks on my browser:
They... look like straight quotes anyway.
Second: Suppose I want to edit this article, I take the first sentence:
In 1975, Judge Torres wrote “Carlito’s Way” and its sequel “After Hours”, |
...and somehow I cut the quotes off of the movie's title. When I go to put them back, I can't type-in curly quotes, (A point I have made before [1]), so I type them in straight:
In 1975, Judge Torres wrote "Carlito’s Way" and its sequel “After Hours”, |
Question: For those of you who can see the difference, is it ugly? Not the straight quotes themselves, but the fact that both types are used in the same article? Because if it is, what you're proposing would require me to replace all the quotes in an article to straight quotes any time I use straight quotes anywhere. Ravenswood 23:10, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
This archived discussion on quotation marks continues on Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_19 >>