Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2013-02/Disallow typographic punctuation in policies

• Voting on: disallowing standard publishing-style typographic punctuation in the text of policy pages, in favour of typewriting-style ASCII punctuation. This includes using typographic apostrophes ( ’ ) in favour of neutral apostrophes ( ' ), single quotation marks ( ‘ ’ ) in favour of neutral apostrophes ( ' ' ), double quotation marks ( “ ” ) in favour of neutral quotation marks ( " " ), en dashes ( – ) and em dashes ( — ) in favour of hyphens ( - ) or doubled hyphens ( -- ), and other such changes. It is anticipated that this vote will set a precedent, to obviate many future votes on insignificant changes to policy pages that may be contested.

• Vote starts: 00:01, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

• Vote created:  —Michael Z. 2013-02-15 16:24 z
• Discussion:

  Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2013/February#Quotes in WT:CFI

  Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2013-02/Disallow typographic punctuation in policies

• See also

  Wiktionary:Votes/2013-02/Typographic vs ASCII punctuation in policies

1. Support Not only are they a big burden, but usage is different across the languages of the world, making it a pain to correctly typeset quotes in foreign languages. It's much easier to just forget about them and use the symbols everyone has on their keyboard. -- Liliana • 06:40, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

   I think the vote is referring ("in the text of policy pages") to the running text of policy pages and not examples therein, though I have to say I'm not certain.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:55, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

   Usage is different between British and North American English practices, but I’m afraid we have to deal with that with either style of quotation mark glyphs. —Michael Z. 2013-02-25 16:38 z

1. Oppose  Our lack of a style guideline is preventing editors from trying to realize good typography, or even consistent typography, in our documents. This vote can be a step forward. —Michael Z. 2013-02-24 17:56 z
2. Oppose. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 18:32, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
3. Oppose. I don't support disallowing either style of quotation mark.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:18, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

   Incidentally, the word "changes" in the "Voting on" section makes it seem (to me, anyway) that we're voting on barring emending preexisting words of the policy pages to change typewriter-style marks to typeset-style marks only, and not on barring typeset-style marks in additions to the pages. The first part of the "Voting on" section, on the other hand, sounds like it's referring to any edit to the policy pages. So I can't tell exactly what we're talking about. Either way, though, I oppose.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:26, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

   It was intended to mean any edits that introduce typographical-style punctuation, whether they are style changes or additions of new text. —Michael Z. 2013-02-25 16:43 z

4. Oppose. --Prosfilaes (talk) 07:25, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
5. Oppose. I think that viewing curly vs. straight quotes should be somehow user-configurable for the reader. I don't want to see any particular style enforced for the writer. Equinox ◑ 16:51, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

   I don’t think that’s practical unless we switch from typing quotation marks to using HTML <q> tags. This is an interesting idea for other reasons, but I can’t imagine any reader actually bothering with such an option. Do you know of any websites that successfully offer this? —Michael Z. 2013-02-25 17:05 z

   I don't. But we, for example, support serial comma/Oxford comma with the {{,}} notation. Equinox ◑ 17:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

   We don’t support it in our writing (for fun, add {{,}} to all of our policy pages), and I can’t find any docs or interface for it. We also have some horrendous stuff to do with brackets and declension tables that puts in redundant content and hides some of it with CSS, which I have to get around to removing. Good, consistent writing that doesn’t distract readers is much more valuable than complicated widgets that do. —Michael Z. 2013-02-25 18:42 z

6. Oppose Ƿidsiþ 17:01, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
7. Oppose this vote. However, I oppose unvoted-on quote-style-switching edits to policies. Currently, policies use a mixture of styles of quotations marks. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:11, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
8. Oppose —Stephen ^(Talk) 06:32, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Fails 1–8–0. Thus, standard publishing-style typographic punctuation isn't disallowed in the text of policy pages in favor of typewriting-style ASCII punctuation.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:33, 4 April 2013 (UTC)