User talk:Lars Trebing

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[edit] Apostrophes

Just a heads up - I'm proposing undoing your edit and moving the "Life of Brian" article back to a standard apostrophe, if you want to comment on it: Talk:Monty_Python’s_Life_of_Brian#Requested_move. Thanks. --McGeddon 18:51, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out, as I would very probably have overlooked it otherwise. Most of my Wikipedia activity is focused on the German version, where correct typography is encouraged both in articles and titles. I didn’t know that the English Wikipedia has different recommendations here. I still think that using what you call a “standard apostrophe” is always wrong except when using really old-fashioned technology like typewriters or DOS-based computers. On the other hand, I’m not really involved in the English Wikipedia, so I won’t try to change that recommendation nor continue correcting these typographical mistakes. – Lars Trebing (talk) 20:41, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I don't know if you read all the comments, but somebody mentioned that the English Wikipedia's manual of style actually discourages curly apostrophes because the character isn't on all English keyboards, and makes the titled article harder to edit consistently, or to search for. I suppose it's mostly a regional-keyboard issue. --McGeddon (talk) 10:17, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I did read something about keyboards not containing typographically correct apostrophes, but in my eyes this is a rather lame excuse. German keyboards for example (and, as far as I know, standard computer keyboards in all countries) come without a dedicated apostrophe key, so this can’t be the reason why it is recommended in the German version and discouraged in the English version. Let’s have two separate looks at the two aspects of apostrophe usage, namely editing and searching. For editing articles, typographically correct apostrophes are not a real issue. Some of the people who contribute to Wikipedia always focus on adding content and don’t care about details like perfect spelling or typography; these people will of course never start using real apostrophes either. But even if we use simplified apostrophe replacement characters instead, we won’t get inherent consistency because issues like spelling, grammar and style remain. This is where another type of Wikipedia contributors enter the scene, namely those who don’t add much new content but focus more on QA. These people will go through articles that they read and add grammar/style/typography consistency by making minor edits. By the way, adding real apostrophes is only difficult when you don’t want to use them. On Windows computers, just press and hold the Alt key while typing 0146 on the numeric keypads (I have entered thousands of apostrophes that way), on Apple computers just press the Alt key while typing the apostrophe. Plus, the Wikipedia edit form includes a handy set of special characters that can be added anywhere with a single click. When searching for articles, real apostrophes don’t make any difference at all as long as appropriate redirections are in place (which are easy to set up and are even automatically created when you rename an article). — Lars Trebing 11:09, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm just reporting the guidelines in the MoS. It looks like it's being discussed on the MoS talk page if you want to argue the case against ASCII apostrophes and maybe get the MoS changed. --McGeddon 12:45, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing me to that discussion, but after reading about halfway through it my decision is even clearer than before. Christoph Päper (whose name I knew long before Wikipedia came into existence because he is one of the top character code experts in Germany) is constantly making all the points that I made above, plus a few other good ones, and all other participants of the discussion just can’t stop repeating the same unfunded nonsense. If this is how discussions in the English Wikipedia works, I just don’t want to participate in them (nor become overly involved in the English Wikipedia at all), because I’m sick of this kind of “reasoning”. — Lars Trebing 22:44, 1 December 2007 (UTC)