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Darkfrog24 (talk | contribs) That many Wikipedians believe it does a better job is true. However, whether or not it actually does has never been proven. |
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|q=Why does the Manual of Style mandate the use of logical quotation instead of traditional American or British styles of punctuation? |
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|a=Many Wikipedians believe that this system does a better job of preserving the text being quoted. |
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Revision as of 04:11, 4 January 2010
Wikipedia's Manual of Style sometimes has conventions that differ from other well-known style manuals and from what is often taught in schools. These differences are usually deliberate and have been discussed in great detail. New contributors are advised to check the FAQ and the archives to see if their concern has already been discussed.
To view an explanation to the answer, click the [show] link to the right of the question.
Why does the Manual of Style forbid the use of curly or typographic quotes and apostrophes (the characters “, ”, ‘, and ’)?
Readers may only know how to type in straight quotes (such as " and ') when searching for text within a page, and web browsers do not currently find curly quotes when users type straight quotes.
Why does the Manual of Style mandate the use of logical quotation instead of traditional American or British styles of punctuation?
Many Wikipedians believe that this system does a better job of preserving the text being quoted.
Why does the Manual of Style permit the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun?
Singular they has been used for hundreds of years by some of the best writers in the English language.
Why does the Manual of Style distinguish between hyphens (-), en dashes (–), em dashes (—), and minus signs (−)?
Many Wikipedians believe that using different glyphs for different purposes improves readability. Using hyphens everywhere would make certain constructions ambiguous (for example, an em dash meant to set off a short bit of text from the surrounding text could be confused with a compound adjective) or illegible (for example, a minus sign in a superscript is legible, but some fonts render hyphens so small that they become hard to read).