Commons:Requests for comment/straight vs curly apostrophes
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- The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
- Clear consensus in favor of this addition to policy. Fæ's proposed wording seems reasonable to me. –Juliancolton | Talk 23:55, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
RFC: Use straight instead of curly apostrophes for categories[edit]
This RFC is in response to a request made at the Village Pump in this original discussion.
There are two common apostrophes, the straight one (') and the curly one (’). In some cases category names involve possessives, for instance Category:Ball’s Pyramid, which uses the curly apostrophe. That category also has a redirect to it from Category:Ball's Pyramid that uses the straight apostrophe. It is proposed that it become Commons' policy to use the straight apostrophe in such cases.
This issue came to light when at the English Wikipedia the article en:Ball's Pyramid was landing in the maintenance category en:Category:Commons category with local link different than on Wikidata. This turns out (after a couple minutes of confusion) to be because that article was using the en:Template:Commons category as "{{Commons category|Ball's Pyramid}}" instead of "{{Commons category|Ball’s Pyramid}}".
The English Wikipedia "does not recommend" curly apostrophes (en:MOS:CURLY) in its articles. (They aren't forbidden and sometimes you do need them but this is rare.) This recommendation isn't arbitrary and there's a good reason for it: curly quotes marks are not possible to type on the majority of keyboards and so this negatively affects usability and searching for the majority of users. As the straight quote is a regular ASCII character likely appears on the majority of all keyboards and also does not require more complicated encodings to handle. Experience also suggests that users do not always use the proper curly apostrophe character but sometimes one of the apostrophe-looking characters such as the acute accent (´) and minute tick (′).
Having and allowing non-uniformity in the quote characters would unnecessarily complicate the required logic of automatic tools such as en:Template:Commons category above. As there really is no good reason to use them, it should be a recommendation of Commons to avoid the curly apostrophe in (at least) category names. Or at the least it should be no big deal to convert from curly to straight upon request (as is my original motivation for Category:Ball’s Pyramid).
This proposal does not affect filenames whatsoever. Those can and should be whatever the uploader wishes them to be. Jason Quinn (talk) 09:13, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
Support This probably could have remained a discussion on the talk page of Commons:Categories#Category_names. I suggest that where that subsection mentions Latin alphabets, that this is included as "basic English characters (ISO/IEC 646) should be prefered over national variants or extension character sets, where reasonable to do so". --Fæ (talk) 14:27, 27 November 2016 (UTC)- Support The difference is purely typograpical, and one can be typed easily from the keyboard while the other can't. Similarly for straight vs. curly doublequotes, where they may arise. - Jmabel ! talk 21:32, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- comment be aware that some spell checkers go the other way, so it may be a long term problem. Slowking4 § Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 14:07, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
- Support banning smartquotes from Commons category names -- "Smartquotes" may be appropriate in some general connected-text contexts, but in the much more constrained context of Commons category names, they're not useful... AnonMoos (talk) 14:28, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
- Support as obvious... curly quotes are 'good typography' but horrible for usability, and having them in category names only leads to confusion and breakage. Reventtalk 00:43, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
- Support Per all the arguments above. Kaldari (talk) 20:08, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
- Drive-by Support of an obviously good idea. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 14:52, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.