Ὁ οἶστρος

WP:MOS

Just so you know, w:WP:MOS has no authority here, as we're not Wikipedia. That's not to say you've done anything wrong though. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:37, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

Hello Mglovesfun. Thanks for letting me know. So, is it OK if I change incorrect punctuation, then? I couldn't find any explicit WT guidelines on this, but hyphens and dashes are clearly different characters (in the same way that question marks and exclamation marks are distinct symbols), fulfilling different typographic functions – it's only that they look very similar (and aren't readily available on standard keyboards). When I read something and happen upon hyphens incorrectly used in place of dashes, it just kinda irks me, so I do those edits on the fly. I know it's very minor stuff and may seem pedantic, but I think decent typography behooves a reference website – at the very least, it certainly doesn't hurt it. So, again, is such copy editing desired or even allowed here, and if so, what edit summary should I use? – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 13:28, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

But you yourself are using endashes surrounded by spaces. Is that the British practice? Germans use an endash with spaces, too, but Spanish uses the emdash and a space on only one side (it’s actually a little more complicated than that). American style is an emdash with no spaces—like so. We have a lot of text here in other languages, and you have to know the standard for the language before you can change it. Generally we don’t change BrE to AmE or vice versa, so you really have to be circumspect and very careful before changing things like this. —Stephen ^(Talk) 13:57, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Stephen. Thanks for the heads-up. I agree, it's all rather complicated. I didn't know about Spain, but I noticed that in the US, the "en dash + spaces" variant is used more and more, and publications like the IHT even use spaced em dashes (then, there's the whole debate about what spaces to employ, as there's a whole array of typgraphical options, however, Wikipedia discourages the use of any of them but the standard ones) – yeah, I know, it's really an international newspaper, but it's owned by The New York Times Company, so... (from the top of the head, I don't remember the NYT's practise, or if they even handle it consistenly, though).

Also, there are situations where even in the States, en dashes are used very often (like, spaced in bullet point-type lists or [off- and online] headlines or [film or book] titles) or always (in the context of, for example, years and page numbers, like, "1842–1913", "May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882" or "pp. 23–34").

When I make changes, I try to be consistent within the affected page and "harmonize" punctuation (like, if there are three unspaced em dashes, two spaced en dashes and three spaced hyphens in an article, I convert the characters in the latter two sets to unspaced em dashes – leaving en dashes constructs involving years or page numbers intact, of course). However, it's always wrong to pass off hyphens as dashes.

Since WP:MoS doesn't seem to apply here, do you have a suggestion what I could use as an edit summary? – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 15:25, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

into

I've reverted your edit to [[into]]: if a source uses poor typography, that's potentially valuable information for interpreting the cite. We shouldn't modify a cite to make the source seem more respectable than it is. —Ruakh_TALK 20:10, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Page moves

You are gonna fix all the links, right? [1] Also there should probably be consensus/voting for this kind of page move. Those em dashes are a hassle, hard to type. Equinox ◑ 23:56, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Am about to. However, should I edit the two talk pages? (am wary about editing user pages) – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 00:05, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Just realized four of those are archived, the first two non-editable:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2006/January

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2006/February

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2009/March

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2009/October

Can't I somehow force the old URL to auto-redirect to where it did before? – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 00:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

The old and new redirect both point to the right page now. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:23, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks. And sorry for the confusion I caused. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 00:26, 18 November 2013 (UTC)