Forum:Apostrophy or right quote?

Forums: Helping Hand > Apostrophy or right quote?

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I was going to fix a few stray right quotes (Unicode U+2019 -’-) and change them to apostrophies (Unicode U+0027 -'-) but I discovered it might not be as simple as I thought so I opened this forum topic. I believe we should be using the most common character set we can and still represent the correct spelling of FR names etc. As such, the apostrophy is the correct character to indicate possessives and plurals. I ran into this problem earlier when using my MacBook to edit pages. When I tried to search for them on my PC I couldn't find them. It seems the MacBook wants to use the right quote instead of the apostrophy.

Try this: Type "Player" (without the quotes) into the main search box at the top of any wiki page and wait to see how many titles it suggests. Then type the apostrophy on your keyboard, making the search term "Player'" and see how many titles disappear from the suggestion list. I think this will happen regardless of which brand of computer you use, but I don't have my MacBook handy to try it.

I propose using the 7-bit ASCII apostrophy (Unicode U+0027 -'-) for all plurals and possessives in article titles so that searching will always return the correct results. The right quote is really intended to be paired with the left quote around a passage of text.

What do you think, sirs?

Moviesign 15:10, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

I believe we had a similar problem with the years preceding 0 DR, where several of the years were using — (long dash) instead of - (dash). Fw190a8 resolved it by changing them all to the standard dash. I believe the same should be true of the apostrophe/right quotes problem; the apostrophe is more common (and is found more often on keyboards) than the right quote.

Cronje ^{(talk ⋅ contribs)} 19:00, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

The main reason I'm asking this is because I discovered Niirfa-sa had renamed a few pages the other way back in 2009. See the history of Player’s Guide to Faerûn for example. Is it possible to undo a page rename even if other edits have happened since then?

Moviesign 19:39, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

Cronje's quite right. Although it would be more grammatically correct to use en dash, em dash and inverted comma characters, nobody has these on the keyboard. We should therefore use the most appropriate keyboard keys such as straight apostrophe and the hyphen character.

Pages can be moved back over the top of previously moved pages, even if there have been subsequent edits.

As an aside, we ought to have a policy to make the use of standard keyboard characters official.

As another aside, you should be using the û character in Faerûn which is easy to type or to copy/paste from somewhere. We have redirects in place for when people search for Faerun without the special character! ;)

User:Fw190a8 23:33, January 10, 2012 (UTC)

I have been fixing apostrophes to the straight version... just thought I would bump this... glad FW approves, because I've gone medieval of these buggers :)

Darkwynters (talk) 19:23, March 20, 2013 (UTC)

Bumping this for ESM :)

—Moviesign (talk) 20:42, January 2, 2014 (UTC)