User talk:SidP

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[edit] Punctuation, HTML character entities

Before you do mass edits of punctuation and other style issues, please read Wikipedia:Manual of Style and its related articles. English style issues are a point of heated contention in Wikipedia's global audience, so we've spent tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people-hours crafting style policies that can accomodate the conflicting standards that exist not only between countries, but even between school systems and publishers within each country.

Specifically, please note that WP's policy on punctuation and quotes splits the difference between American and British usage by using "double quotes" for quoting, but placing punctuation outside the quotes unless it is actually part of the quoted text. Also, Wikipedia uses Unicode characters, so please don't use HTML character entities (like – and —) unless the character is not a common Unicode character. Edit windows have a convenient set of clickable Unicode characters below the Save/Preview/Show changes buttons to make text insertion easy. Thank you for your cooperation. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:21, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Jeff, thanks for the guidance. It's really the best way to learn these matters in Wikipedia (though less efficient for others). I must admit, however, that my misinformed activities regarding dashes is taken directly from Wikipedia's own style directives. As for comma placement, I am still not clear on what specifically I did that you refer to. Usually I keep the comma outside a quote that would not be a part of language (such as a title). Otherwise, I hardly ever make a correction on this issue because I know there are multiple accepted styles. Feel free to set me straight. Thanks again for your help. SidP 19:04, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
Please forgive me for not citing the specific edit that caused me to comment. I normally include the links to make my points clear, but my failure this time, combined with your rapid editing, made it rather challenging to identify the article I had a problem with. I was thinking specifically of your otherwise excellent edit [1] to Firefly (TV series). The particular problems I saw were moving a comma inside a quoted phrase ("Earth that was"), and unnecessarily changing Unicode en-dashes (–) into their equivalent HTML character entities (–).
I also didn't provide specific links to the relevant policies, Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation marks and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes). Taking another look at them, I can see the potential confusion with the dash policy at least, because it currently is somewhat unclear about the use of character entities. On the one hand, it says (in "Dashes and hyphens used on Wikipedia" to "use the HTML entity —, which the MediaWiki engine automatically converts into a numeric entity in the rendered HTML". On the other hand, in the intro section of the article, in bold, it says "Now that Wikipedia uses UTF-8, these can be entered directly into the article markup. To enter an em dash after your cursor, for instance, you can click the "—" link below the edit box". The confusion probably comes from someone adding the bold statement, once Wikipedia switched to UTF-8, without bothering to update the remaining text to reflect this change. (Worse, the first statement is now in error, as the MediaWiki engine now converts – to a UTF-8 character, not a numeric entity.) I've posted a note on the dash-policy talk page to ask that they update it. Again, I apologize for the lack of details. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 11:53, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hello

Hello, I was just wiki-surfing and I came across some of your work. I noticed that you have 9,573 edits with 9,381 of those in the mainspace. Have you ever thought of being an admin?--Sallicio\color{Red} \oplus 05:32, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Basically, you would just clean up after others messes (e.g, deleting pages that don't fall within standards, maintaining the integrity of the site (providing guidance for newcomers, warnings of uncivil behavior, dealing with users that utilize sockpuppets or meat puppets, and (as a last resort) blocking those users for gross negligence of wiki-policies. It's not a promotion, per se, it just helps keep the site respectable. But be warned that the Request for Adminship (RfA) can be a lot like having people constantly throwing pebbles at you whilst you remain nice with a smile. Check out some of these RfA's. Let me know, and I will nominate you!--Sallicio\color{Red} \oplus 19:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

No problem, whenever you would like "the mop" (as it is called), I will make the nomination! Cheers!--Sallicio\color{Red} \oplus 20:47, 7 March 2008 (UTC)