pup joint wikipedia quotation
As I understand it, it is a prejudice of American printers that little bits like periods look "bad" hanging outside the "quotes". I don"t agree and I have to catch myself when I"m writing commercially to do it the American way, but in everything I write for myself I do it British style and I was delighted to note when I was working up the Manual of Style that British was already the convention in Wikipedia. Ortolan88
The rule has been in there since the first draft. I believe it is clearer that way. There were many examples of this usage in the Wikipedia already. I tried to make the first draft reflect what was already "best practice" in Wikipedia. Ortolan88 22:21, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
The current Wikipedia policy is often called "logical quotation". I far prefer it, despite what I was taught in school, and always use it when not prevented. Proponents of "typographical quotation" claimed it "looks better". Too often, I believed, it did not look better. It looked stupid. This is especially so in lists of words and meanings. For example, using logical punctuation:
(The use of single quotation marks here rather than double quotation marks is standard linguistics usage when indicating a meaning of a previous word or phrase regardless of whether in the article as a whole double quotation marks or singlular quotation marks are used for top level quoting. I use it in Wikipedia since I prefer it and guideliness currently don"t specify and the convention has spread to technical writing outside of linguistics. But using double quotation marks wouldn"t change the point.)
This is only my personal feeling, not binding on anyone. If the Wikipedia Style Guide specifications had specified typographical quotation, I would bend to its whims. But considering that logical punctuation is specified in prestigious British style guides and in some general technical style guides, it is doubtful that such a rule would have stayed fixed in Wikipedia. The only reasonable choices are between letting the editor choose and logical quotation everywhere.
I take Wikipedia as more technical than literary and this recommendation to come from noting increased use of logical punctuation in academic and technical writing outside of Britain.
Various observations: The comma and period inside the quotes "look better" only when true typography is used to place the quote over the punctuation, so that"s not really an argument for doing it. My arguments for doing it come from Chicago and many other American style guides, but most acknowledge the historic reasons for the punctuation order. In technical style guides here, it is not the general case for punctuation to go outside the quotes, only when what"s inside the quotes is an exact value (as in: type this URL into the field: "http://www.foo.com".). However, I have no problem using the Wikipedia style guide and editing according to that. Elf | Talk 15:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
If I am reading correctly, this "no rigid rule" paragraph is the only part of this proposed policy that is actually new, the rest is pretty much as it already is in the Manual of Style. Ortolan88 03:24, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC) PS -- I should state my bias. I wrote the first draft of the Manual of Style, basing it on what I found in the Wikipedia at that time, and the rule about "logical quotes" was in that first draft because many carefully written articles, including mine, already used it. Ortolan88
Punctuation should go inside quotes because every legit style manual says to do it this way. It makes Wikipedia look unprofessional to allow otherwise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.44.144.59 (talk) 15:13, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
Note that if a word appears in an article with single quotes, such as "abcd", the Wikipedia:Searching facility will find it only if you search for the word with quotes (when trying this out with the example mentioned, remember that this article is in the Wikipedia namespace). Since this is rarely desirable, this problem is an additional reason to use double quotes, for which this problem does not arise. It may even be a reason to use double quotes for quotations within quotations as well.
The only real change here is removal of long-standing Wikipedia preference for logical quotation. But editors have long time been writing articles by this standard and correcting articles to fit this standard. As with any change here, consensus is needed. And I don"t see that occurring.
I agree with Chuck on the Hawai"i issue, which is controversial and not clear and also not altogether folllowed. Does this mean that when referring to Hawaiian names in an English context one should use the straight quotation rather than the grave, or that even when quoting Hawai"ian forms natively one should do the same? I don"t think the latter is intended, or at least would not be understood now as being a reasonable rule. That should be made clear. There is an increasing tendency in general for use of rarer Unicode characters to appear throughout Wikipedia as fonts increasingly support them. I have seen use of the ‘ character in Hawaiian names and the only objector I"ve seen to it backed down at once when the user made an issue of it, even saying that if the editor wanted to persist in using it against the standard, he"d support the user. It is hard to remember that even as short a time as three years is was considered rather daring on the web to display even common characters outside of ISO Latin-1 without special downloadable fonts and how a few cranks were still raving away on usenet claiming that Unicode couldn"t work and that no-one was using it. That no-one is generally addressing the matter of rare characters may indicate that there is no problem to be addressed, that is, that those using rare characters are largely doing so with reasonable restraint and issues raised are being solved reasonably by individual discussions.
Publishers adopt style guides that are appropriate to their publications. It makes sense for Wikipedia to do so, and there"s nothing wrong with using essentially British punctuation conventions when they are easy for volunteer editors to apply and will avoid confusion in thousands of technical articles. —Michael Z. 2005-03-17 19:37 Z
The manual recommends US style headers Start the first word and any proper nouns in headings with a capital letter, but leave the rest of the heading lower case. Personally I have no problem with this because it is within the range of what is acceptable in Commonwealth/International English and although it is not a universal rule in C/I. E., it helps to give Wikipedia a more standard look. I would hope that A.E. practitioners can accept that the looser C/I English punctuation if they come across it in an article. Spelling is another matter because spelling color and colour does not really lend its self to a literate compromise. Angels dancing on a pinheads come to mind over this discussion. Philip Baird Shearer 13:35, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
But in what sense is this U.S. style for headings? Any publishing house or journal has a house style, and the variety of such styles is dizzying. I"d be very surprised if the Wikipedia style of headings weren"t at least as common in the U.K. as in the U.S. (I"ve done a quick and unscientific bit of research, and in fact the Wikipedia style proved to be by far the most common in the U.K.-published books at which I looked, including those from C.U.P., Routledge, Blackwell, and Pan; only O.U.P. used all initial capitals, though that style was used by many U.S.-published books, including those from Open Court, Duke U.P., Prentice-Hall, and Paragon House.) Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:01, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I disagree with the current phrasing. As a foreigner I read "we split the difference between American and British usage" and had no clue what it meant. I had to read the discussion to understand. First, the fact: "Wikipedia uses the American quotation symbol (") and the British punctuation rules." Second, the rationale: "These are the best choices for reasons of symbol visibility and sentence logic." So finally the "split the difference" comment is not the fact, not the rationale, just a happy consequence. If you want it, then it should come third after the fact and rationale which are more important.--67.124.149.4 21:51, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I think consistency within an article is both more important and more achievable than consistency throughout the entirety of Wikipedia. I believe the debate about UK versus American spellings reached the same conclusion. —HorsePunchKid→龜 04:46, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Though having said that, the style on the manual now is (for the msot part) the one I always use in all my writing (before I came to Wikipedia). Neonumbers 11:42, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
Please explain how "logical quoting" relates to a list of song titles that are punctuated with quotation marks. I understand a quotation to be something different from a list of song titles that use quotation marks for punctuation. Listing four song titles in a sentence and placing the commas outside the quotation marks punctuating the song titles makes the resulting changed text appear to my eyes like some sort of programming language, rather than English. My reaction may be caused by my eyes becoming used to American editing style manuals from my work outside Wikipedia for the past 20 years. Trying to edit differently here than I do elsewhere, as though Wikipedia began as a British publication (which it did not), is going to become confusing for me.
I"m also trying to understand if Wikipedia style has settled without dispute on using British logical quoting for quotations, when that happened, and why British style should dominate Wikipedia. (I had visited the style manual many times before and did not notice this before.) No American style guide that I know of used by professional editors adopts the placing of commas and periods outside quotation marks. Here is the only archive I"ve found so far of Wikipedia discussions on the subject, merely noting a small handful of contributor attitudes on the subject: Quotes talk archive. I didn"t find that discussion to have clearly come to a conclusion.
I want to get everything straight about what"s correct form so that I can be consistent, correct any errors I have made myself, and so that I won"t, worse yet, accidentally mis-edit someone else"s work in the future. Until now, I had been adhering to styles I thought Wikipedia"s style guide was based on (particularly for References citation style), such as Chicago Manual of Style, APA, and AP. I had thought at one point in the past some part of the Wikipedia style guide had said to use American style on American topics and British style on British topics, but I now doubt that memory was true (or it might have been in a citation style discussion, but I don"t remember). Once I"m clear on how to handle this in the future, I will consistently apply whatever is the approved style to use, assuming it doesn"t keep changing. --Emerman 18:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
I continue to hope someone will explain the relationship of "logical quoting" style to a series of song titles separated by commas and using quotation marks, which is what led me to write this question, rather than have this part of the question be confused with punctuation of a quoted passage. A series of song titles listed in a sentence is not a "quotation." (Was the immediately preceding sentence supposed to end with the period outside the quotation marks in "logical quotation" style, by the way? Same with the comma I put with the phrase "AE style" in the above paragraph? Changing either to have the punctuation outside the quote mark would be awkward looking.) Why did a person changing the commas in a Wikipedia article I"d written separating song titles with commas refer to his edit as "logical quoting"? There is nothing being "quoted" in the case of a series of song titles punctuated with quotation marks. Also, as to your quotation logic comment, I have never had any ambiguity about when to use the comma or period inside a quotation; it is simply not an issue. The logical quoting style tries to make it an issue, but it is not one necessary to consider if you simply always put the period or comma inside the quotation. Whether the punctuation was in the original or not is irrelevant. --Emerman 19:45, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
My comment above is in the context of Wikipedia, where logical quoting does tend to be the general practice and has been for a long time, even for Wikipedia articles in AE style. I think this reflects the influence of computer culture, where, due to the importance of giving a string of text literally, this has become more common, even in the U.S. --Jonathunder 20:15, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. Could you please clarify if you mean "arts and entertainment" by your use of the term "AE"? Yes, I did mention the style looked like a programming language rather than English, re: your comment about computer culture. I have not been using the logical quote style you mention as being widespread in Wikipedia in my editing. I notice it in some articles but didn"t think it was widespread in Wikipedia. I think it looks horrible. It makes perfect sense in computer text strings though. My work background includes both technical editing and journalism, by the way, so I"m familiar with computer and internet-oriented styles too. The journals and magazines I read online are not using the style someone has convinced people is fine for Wikipedia. I don"t understand how this happened; you seem to indicate it"s a techie trend, perhaps among bloggers, but it"s not the trend in online magazines. --Emerman 21:01, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
I think Jonathunder"s explanation is probably more-or-less correct. Most Britishisms make me cringe and it takes a good deal of willpower not to correct them, but for whatever reason "logical quoting" seems perfectly natural and correct to me, and that sentiment seems to be fairly widespread on Wikipedia. This is in fact one of the oldest parts of the MoS and it has rarely been questioned. For your particular example, anything that appears in quote marks is ipso facto a quotation, so the rule applies to them. The following has standard Wikipedia punctuation for a sentence containing a list of song titles:
I think it"s not that someone scooted their opinion past anyone— it"s just that probably the majority of people on Wikipedia so far who care about the issue agree with the style. This is the first time I"ve seen it questioned. I don"t mean to deflate your balloon too much and I"m sorry you think this style looks "horrid", but I think this style is pretty universally well-liked on Wikipedia, even by anti-consistency chaos hawks such as myself.
One could research in the history how long it"s been in the Manual of Style, but I know for certain it"s been there as long as I"ve been editing Wikipedia articles (mid-2003) because it was one of the first things I looked up. You must have overlooked it before. --Nohat 21:44, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
It was there for a long time, then it disappeared around New Year"s (between 2004 and 2005) and then was reinserted in March 2005. The problem is that a lot of contributors (myself included) who started editing Wikipedia during the winter of 2004 were not aware of that crazy rule since it was not in the MoS during that period. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive12 for more information about the debate that resulted. Furthermore, I continue to disagree with the rule in its current state as an insane compromise that satisfies no one. I personally use American English punctuation when editing pages that are purely or almost completely about American subjects (especially American law, where proper punctuation is extremely important). Of course, as a matter of basic courtesy, when editing pages about topics that are not specific to the United States, I do preserve the British usage when I come across it.
The "logical quote style" means that punctation goes inside the quotation marks if and only if it is part of the content being quoted. In the case of a song title, if a comma is part of a song title, it goes inside the quote marks, otherwise it does not. I have long (for years before the creation of wikipedia) used this style exclusively in my writing, adn i live and have always lived in the US. Therfore would write a list of song titles as (for example "Raindrops keep Falling on my Head", "Yesterday", "When I"m in Town, I call on You", "Reaching Out...", and "Only You". This makes it clear which punctuation is and which is not part of the title. I understand this to be the agreed and most commonly used style on wikipedia. It would have been my choice had I been polled on the issue. --DES (talk) 02:42, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
Since you mention American law, Coolcaesar--can you cite any bill-drafting style guide, for the U.S. Congress or any state legislature, which does not follow the "logical" formatting? The bills I"ve seen, and a couple of bill-drafting guides I"ve seen, are pretty much like the Wikipedia rules. Gene Nygaard 08:23, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Finally, I fail to see what the point of your point is, because very few bills are so notable that they need to be parsed phrase by phrase on Wikipedia (especially before they are signed into law).--Coolcaesar 20:17, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Americans would do well, in my opinion, to adopt this logical system of quotation. Its looks can"t take that much getting used to. However, I guess that would be hoping for too much. At least here at Wikipedia logic prevails in this respect. Long let it.
Yeah, I was just being pedantic since we"re in a pedantic mood. Another point: I"m Australian but I don"t ever recall learning this logical punctuation style at school. In fact I don"t think I"d ever been aware of the issue until I read about it at Wikipedia. I"ve always used logical punctuation simply because it"s logical. Never really gave the issue any thought. Now, though, I notice the American style and, as I say, it grates on me like I guess the logical style grates on Emerman.
It"s somewhat misleading to call it "British punctuation" as it"s used by everyone but the Americans. There are good reasons to favour what is better referred to as "international punctuation". Firstly, it"s logical: punctuation marks go where they belong. Secondly, it"s unambiguous: with the American style you might not be able to determine whether the punctuation was part of the quote or not. A third reason specific to Wikipedia is that this topic has been done to death and the general consensus it to stick with logical punctuation. Jimp 00:21, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
This would be correct anywhere, I thought. Some U.S. publishing conventions seem incorrect to UK readers. But our practice of putting punctuation inside quotation marks in dialog is not the same as placing punctuation in quoted printed matter. The convention is that quotes go outside everything from the source text. Fragmented conversational quotes are the only time one punctuation mark, the comma, goes before the closing quote mark. Very few Wikipedia articles are going to contain quoted speech that was never printed, I would think.
We"ve been over this a million times already. British usage = world usage. Even American style guides are finally starting to catch on to logical quoting. Wikipedia uses logical quoting. Let"s move on. Kaldari 03:18, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
I"m an American convert to "logical quoting". I"ve been using the style for over ten years now, except when I"ve been forced to use the traditional style because I"m writing for publications that have adopted another style. It"s sensible and easy to understand, and it has none of the gotchas of the traditional style. It can be stated extremely simply: "put punctuation belonging to the quote inside the quotation marks; any other punctuation goes outside". I think that the rationale for using American spelling in American articles doesn"t really apply to quoting, because English spelling is largely empirical; logical quoting, on the other hand, is based on very simple rules. (If there were a widely-understood variant of English orthography that used purely phonetic spelling, I"d be in favor of Wikipedia using that consistently, too. But there isn"t, so using phonetic spelling would be a barrier to readability. No such barrier exists here—people used to traditional American quoting rules can easily adapt to logical quoting.) --TreyHarris 08:42, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
Speaking as an American who was taught to use the American style, the British style makes much more sense and is used pretty much everywhere else. I see no reason for American bizzarness to apply to wikipedia. JoshuaZ 04:22, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
It has recently come to my attention that some articles use a comma between a person"s name and suffix and others do not. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr. and William Strunk Jr. I (nor a few other people who have discussed the issue with me) have not found any guideline on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that, while commas historically have often been used, it seems that the pedulum is swinging the other way again.
This is an encyclopedia. There are plenty of people indexed by names other than their birth names. Certainly a suffix can be (and almost always is) part of a legal name; my interpretation of MrD9"s point is that people (generally) have a first, middle, and last name (of course there can be multiple or no middle name – and, frankly, I can only speak for most of the United States), and possibly a suffix. The former president"s birth certificate may list "James Earl Carter, Jr.", but it is accurate to say that his first name is James, his middle name is Earl, his last name is Carter, and his suffix is Jr. Wikipedia could choose to index names as
Your "English grammar book" is actually an "American grammar book". Wikipedia follows its own compromise position between American usage and British usage. This has already been debated at length and decided upon. -Will Beback 06:51, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Uh, really? Where are you getting that? I thought Wikipedia had a uniform style of commas outside the quotes. In fact, I just checked San Francisco, and it does its commas outside the quotes. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 19:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
I concur with you on this issue. For American topics, I see no reason why Wikipedia should adhere to an unsightly punctuation style for which many English teachers in the United States would give a student only half credit (a C grade) or worse. --Coolcaesar 02:27, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
The principle that Wikipedia guidelines should generally be followed deserves imperatives, and general consensus trumps local consensus. Whether we have general consensus is up for debate, but something that"s been on one of our biggest guideline pages for a couple of years needs to be considered prima facie to have consensus. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:35, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
Are we discussing quotation style? Again? It"s not the "British" way, nor the "American" way. It"s called logical quotation style. Wikipedia adopts it. End of story. Shall we put a comment in the MoS with a reference to the archives? PizzaMargherita 07:40, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Of course it is the British way and the American way, and those who call one of these the "logical" style confuse their own familiarity with "logicality". Redefining the language may fool some people, but it doesn"t constitute an argument. If Wikipedia wants to adopt British style, that"s fine, but it shouldn"t misrepresent facts as it does so. -
Very good then, Wikipedia adopts the logical convention. Which incidentally, as discussed in the archives, it"s not correct to call "British", nor it"s entirely correct to call the other one "American". PizzaMargherita 10:29, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Conventions may not be "intrinsically" logical or illogical, but they can be demonstrated to be so. Your argument has failed to convince me that the convention adopted by Wikipedia after a long debate (and I can"t see any new elements being brought forward here) is not logical and that the other one is not illogical, inconsistent (or more complicated) and ambiguous. Feel free to propose a better name for the logical convention. PizzaMargherita 12:12, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I suppose that were you to become arbiter of what things are called, it would be important to convince you. In the meantime, I suggest you call it "the current Wikipedia style suggestion" rather than trying to enforce your perceptions of what is logical by a feat of naming. -
All of those points are a matter of opinion. My opinion is that the current system is better than one page uses one style, another uses another. This is how things work on Wikipedia, it"s a widely-accepted convention even if some people disagree with it. I don"t think it should be changed. If you would like to propose it be changed, by all means you can try, but don"t unilaterally pretend it doesn"t exist. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:41, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Very early in this discussion, somebody said "It also doesn"t make sense to set a rule that will be violated by any literate person who hasn"t read WP"s Manual of Style." I agree with this statement completely. It"s very frustrating for me to have to learn a whole new set of rules for Wikipedia that don"t apply any where else. I, an American, should be free to use American conventions when writing for/about Americans, and it"s rather silly of Wikipedia to ask me to do otherwise.
and then I tell you "sure, the sentence that Arthur spoke was the four-word sentence. But I chose to quote only the four words, I chose to terminate my quote just before Arthur"s period. Then of course per British custom and Wikipedia rules, I put my period outside the quotes"?
Well, it may have been discussed to death already, but I certainly never thought I should check and see if Wikipedia invented new grammar rules for me to use. I bet I"m not alone there. Are there other cases where I should be checking Wikipedia"s Manual of Style and finding out how Wikipedia amalgamated to create something brand new? How could anyone possible keep track of this? KP Botany 01:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Could we add an explicit statement at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation specifically stating whether commas should go inside or outside quotation marks? Or is there not enough consensus to do so? (I don"t want to restart the debate over which way is better; I merely want to know whether a consensus has been reached at the English Wikipedia on this point.) --Lph 04:49, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
I understood that the "non-logical" style was based on the typographical aesthetics of the printed page, which are of less relevance to Wikipedia. The logical style is normal in British English and is also preferred in IT circles, where punctuation can be critical. Even though the Chicago University Press continue to use the "American style", they also say (in the Chicago Manual of Style) that the logical style is used in linguistic and philosophical works; textual criticism is another field named as presenting problems for "American" style. The Oxford University Press use the logical style and they point out (in the Oxford Guide to Style) that the ambiguity of the "US practice" can lead to problems when material from US and British sources are mixed. This could be an issue for Wikipedia. --Boson 19:17, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
NB: the proposal here is to acknowledge that Wikipedians in fact use both, as English-speakers in general do. What we recommend is secondary. Septentrionalis
Second, I"m not suggesting any hipocrisy or insincerity. He probably truly believes that an assertive and comprehensive MoS is the best thing for Wikipedia. But what we sincerely believe does often have a strong correlation with what"s good for us; that"s just how we"re built. Others evaluating the proposition "Tony"s a smart guy so what he thinks is best for WP probably really is", need to take that effect into account. --Trovatore 18:14, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Some Americans punctuate logically, but most do not, and are taught not to. To present arguments for both is reasonable; to forbid one is not. The CMS does in fact allow both, but warns against logical punctuation, on the grounds that it requires extraordinary care and some judgment on the part of the proofreader; this may be more care and judgment than Wikipedia may be exprected to supply. As Tony said, this is not a grammatical issue; and insofar as it is an accuracy issue, it is trivial. Septentrionalis
It is not trivial at all, or it wouldn"t have come out this way and the logical style would not be being defended by a (recently growing, I note) majority here. It is not reasonable to present both options (that just leads to inconsistency, and gives equal weight to both reason and emotion); to recommend against (guidelines can"t "forbid" anything at all) illogical quotation style is emminently sensible. As others have pointed out, CMS is not the MoS, and really their argument is simply one of laziness. The CMS, BTW, is intended for mass-market writers/editors such as fiction writers and journalists, and its recommendations on this particular matter (among many others) are directly countermanded by the style guidelines of scientific and other technical fields/publications. Argument to authority is especially fallacious when the authority is not particularly authoritative, which CMS is not outside of its target market, and especially not when it comes to Wikipedia, which has its own standards, generally more stringent in many ways, though looser in others (in that it is less prescriptive grammatically, to account for various dialects of English, while CMS only addresses one. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 09:29, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
And this is emphatically not a UK vs. US English issue. Interior punctuation is already on its way out in the US, and all technical publications in the US use logical quoting. It is called logical quoting for a reason: Interior punctuation adds factual errors, including misquotation, the inclusion of characters that do not belong in the literal string being quoted (very, very serious issue for things like computer code), implying that a statement may be partially quoted when it was not, etc., etc. The punctuation goes on the inside only if it was part of the original. Wikipedia is not a magazine or newspaper, it is a precise publication that cannot afford to use irrational journalistic style preferences that are based on 1700s typesetting needs, just because they happen to still be traditionally preferred by imprecise publications in one country. Undisclaimer: I am an American, so I have no UK bias in this matter whatsoever. This as a trawl through the archives shows that this issue has been hashed over more times that anyone would bother counting, I"m taking the liberty of marking this topic "Resolved". — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 16:11, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
I can"t see how anyone can misquote someone because of the use of punctuation. Also, SMcCandlish states "Wikipedia is not a magazine or newspaper, it is a precise publication that cannot afford to use irrational journalistic style preferences that are based on 1700s typesetting needs"; however, popular encyclopedias such as Encarta and Britannica also use this punctuation, so it is not only "journalistic style." Why are American oriented Wikipedia articles not following the same punctuation as American encyclopedias? Wikipedia says to use American English for American oriented articles and I believe we should do that. This guideline fails to address this issue and makes articles seem less encyclopedic by using style guidelines in contrary to the Chicago MOS and other encyclopedias. Some users seem determined not to address this issue, even stating this issues has been "resolved by consensus," when not all parties agree. Just to remind editors, "consensus" is "a neutral point of view which everybody can agree upon." (WP:CON) —Christopher Mann McKay
Um, no. That"s a blantant misquote. The actual passage is: "Where there are disagreements, they are resolved through polite discussion and negotiation on talk pages in an attempt to develop a neutral point of view" which everybody can agree upon." (Emphasis added.) Please read WP:CONSENSUS more deeply, as well as quote it more accurately. 100% unanimity is not required for there to be consensus, otherwise virtually every single decision every made or needing to be made on Wikipedia could be undone or fillibustered by lone trolls. Please also try to be less literal. When I referred to journalist style, I clearly did not really mean "journalists, all journalists and no one but journalists". To clarify: Britannica like the local newspaper is written for a mass-market audience, almost entirely American, and follows vernacular American mass-market style "rules". Wikipedia"s aim is to greatly exceed works like Britannica in every relevant respect. While WP is intended to be useful to a mass-market audience, we collectively hold ourselves to higher standards such that WP will be of use to everyone from a head of state to a Nobel laureate as well. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 09:41, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
While I can"t deny that the majority of American publications do use the "illogical" style (and while I think the point about "misquotation" is a bit hyperbolic), I think I"m one of quite a large fraction of Americans who prefer the "logical" style. Almost anyone who is or has been a programmer will prefer this style, I think, and that"s a big chunk of American Wikipedians right there. I don"t know if we need rigid prescription in the MOS, but I think the rough de facto consensus is for the "logical" style, and I hope it continues to be so. (It"s a double-edged sword, though -- the rough de facto consensus also seems to be for the spelling aluminium, which makes my skin crawl.) --Trovatore 07:11, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
My apologies for overlooking SMcCandlish"s arguments; are they in this section, as well as the next [this section was moved down; the original follow-up is higher on this page]? I do not happen to use "aesthetic punctuation" myself, but I do not believe McCandlish"s last claim; I was not a liberal arts major, and I did use it as an undergraduate. Nevertheless, I will have to {{dispute}} the omission of the fact of the existence of two systems; I am willing let others recommend the use of one of them fairly strongly, but suppression of fact is regrettable. (And the existence of a recurrent protest is evidence that the statement that Wikipedia only uses one method is simply false; recurrent protests ignored by regulars are one of the hallmarks of bad process.) Septentrionalis
"The omission of the fact"? Huh? It is not the job of the MoS to act as a descriptive linguistics treatise on usage variances around the world. If we "{{dispute}}d" every such "omission" there would be thousands of dispute tags all through the MoS; more dispute tags than actual content. The MoS is here to make specific recommendations about what to do in Wikipedia for our readers" benefit, not list every known usage in the world. There is no "suppression"; please, enough with the histrionic hyperbole. Cf. Godwin"s Law before tossing out "suppression" or similar terms that imply fascistic regimes, please. The recurrent "protest" about this is largely because some people don"t read archives and/or are in denial that for years this has been a settled issue, and doesn"t indicate anything other than that some people get bent out of shape about things that really shouldn"t bother them so much. There is no "statement that Wikipedia" or Wikipedians as a group for that matter "only uses one method", so there is no falsehood. The MoS recommends, as a guideline, one method. This is a good thing. It"s called consistency. That some Wikipedians will ignore this recommendation is of no concern. There is no recommendation in any guideline (or even rule in any policy) here that is not ignored by some editors. So what? Other editors won"t ignore it and (like me) will bring text into conformity with MoS when encountering material that isn"t. Hardly a big deal. And certainly does not militate against a strong recommendation here. The "some people will ignore it" reasoning doesn"t mean anything. Lastly, as this sprawling now-merged metathread indicates, the "protests" are hardly being ignored, so your comparison to bad process if off-base. Just because you are not getting your way does not mean that something isn"t working right. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 09:15, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Indeed. I"m even an American, and I find numerous things in CMS that are just plain off the wall; despite it being in the 15th ed., there are all sorts of irrational inconsistencies and just plain logicfarts in there, "conventions" that even most Americans abandoned 2 generations ago, curiously unAmerican Briticisms here and there, etc., etc. Like Wikipedia itself, the CMS is very palimpsestuous. And it"s hardly the only style guide out there, much less a particularly authoritative one. It is intended for journalism and English majors, and was not written with an eye to precision, accuracy and avoiding ambiguity. And I can"t think of anything more in need of those qualities than an encyclopedia, except maybe things like nuclear reactor specs or space shuttle operating manuals. PS: I haven"t found it particularly fruitful quoting he CMS myself. I"d estimate that for every 10 times I do that I get what I want here maybe once if I"m lucky. Caveat prescriptor. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 05:12, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
There"s absolutely no consensus for such a radical alteration (see long explanation in same basic topic farther up the page of just a handful of the bad things that would happen if this change were made). A tiny handful of loud but incessant complainants who cannot offer a more logical front than "I like it", "it"s what I"m used to", "some prescriptive book I like better than the MoS says so" or "I haven"t thought of any potential fallout, so there must be no potential fallout", do not magically make a new consensus for undoing something that has had very broad consensus for years. This is one of our most important guidelines, and making incautious changes to it (aside from being likely to get immediately reverted) stands a good chance of wreaking a lot of havoc, because every article in Wikipedia looks to this document and its subpages for guidance. I"m not on a high horse here either. There are lots of things I would change in MoS to suit my personal preferences (I"ve even, slowly, gotten a few minor but substantive changes), but oh well, too bad. The vast bulk of the changes I"ve proposed (or in my wikiyouth just gone and boldly made here) have been rejected, and rejected more than once. This guideline and its child guidelines are very, very resistant to willy-nilly changes, with good reason. If you find yourself getting frustrated that you are not getting your way, just drop it for a while and go do something else. It works (I know from exerience; after a week you"ll hardly even remember why you spent so much time arguing with people in MOS instead of working on articles you care about, nuking vandals, or whatever floats your wikiboat.) PS: Some (allegedly) random anon noob joining the fray hardly lends much credence to the "new consensus" idea. When I see Centrx, SlimVirgin, Radiant, Gracenotes, and 20 other hardcore, long-term major contributors all saying "we should change this", I might believe change was in the air, but the fact of the matter is that no one wants this change but a small handful. Now. And 6 month ago. And last year. And the year before that. The numbers never increase, and curiously those who felt strongly about it 18 months ago don"t rejoin the debate (which suggests to me that they realize over time the benefits of logical quoting once they get used to it and stop seeing it as "wrong"). — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 04:50, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Totally in agreement with Tony and SMcCandlish on this one (see excellent points made in sections further up too). In addition to the "keep the quote untouched" argument, I"d like to add a point that makes Wikipedia special in this regard. Not all editors have access to the source. An editor should be able to rephrase a sentence containing a quote without fear that they are changing the quote by adding or removing punctuation. The logical style is the only one that maintains that property. Going for a mixed per-article style is even worse than a wholesale change. Wikidemo—flipping a coin to radically change the quotation style of a project with 2 million articles isn"t wise. Colin°Talk 08:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
For all the reasons given, I support the logical style. Although fine typography sometimes calls for deviations, neither Wikipedia nor any other HTML document can be fine typography, lacking control of typeface (it is only a suggestion), page size, physical and optical margins, hyphenation, microspacing, and all the other things that typographers do to fully optimize text on paper.--Curtis Clark 13:00, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Is the MoS the place to document usage outside Wikipedia? Anyone interested in the fact that another system exists can follow the links to appropriate articles. Aren"t they the place for such documentation? I thought the MoS was a place to prescribe usage here not describe usage elsewhere.
That is not at all what MoS is for; it is to recommend best practices within Wikipedia for Wikipedian (i.e. encyclopedic) purposes (and while this concept relates to observed, described general usage out in the world, the two are not 1:1 identical). You appear to be confusing an internal Wikipedia document with a generally applicable style manual. Get your namespaces straight. :-) — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:30, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
I do not insist on the citation of CMS, which is a relic of an old note. The CMS does in fact permit the logical style but warns against it as requiring extraordinary precision; frankly, this is a problem with it: Wikipedians are not, on average, careful. I would agree to a compromise which introduces this by sayign that Wikipedia normally uses, and recommends the logical style. Septentrionalis
The MOS does not "cite" CMS or Fowler as a "prominent source", as PMAnderson claims (while simultaneously attacking Tony). They are merely mentioned as "well-known style guides" and noted to be among the "reliable guides" one may wish to consult "if this page does not specify a preferred usage". As other have said, detailed commentary on external styles is a distraction to this MOS page, which should focus on WP"s in-house style. There are not "two accepted styles" on Wikipedia. There has only been one style, which was established when, in August 2002, User:Ortolan88 kicked off this MOS with the edit summary, "Beginning "A Manual of Style", copy-editing, consistency and markup fiends please all jump in at once." It would be hard to find a more stable guideline on Wikipedia. Colin°Talk 18:13, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Nice toad-eating, Sandy; but it makes Raul an exception. No, the goal is to make the MOS a practical manual, describing the actual consensus of Wikipedian practice, much broader than this talk page; to have it a less useful tool for the disruptive; and to keep it from saying anything actually silly, like the proposal to require Socrates"s, further up on this talk page. Septentrionalis
No, it means that this discussion has a dozen participants; Wikipedia has thousands of competent editors, Raul among them. Most of those thousands ignore this page; Raul doesn"t. Do you have anything more useful to say than inventing personal attacks, again? Septentrionalis
Yeah, hear, hear! And hear, hear this: "this guideline should be whatever will make the articles, which are what matters, work better." No, it"s simply not true that "Either system works," What some are labelling aethetic punctuation (beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this looks like a misnomer to me) introduces ambiguity: it does not work. If the guideline should be whatever makes articles work better, then it should remain as it has been for the past five years. Nor is this the place to document usage outside of Wikipedia. Certianly our guidlines should be constructed with such usage in mind but they aren"t simply reflexions of it. Nor is our MoS simply a regurgitation of other style guides—sure let"s consider what they have to say but we"re writing our MoS. There are other considerations which go into it, like consensus and this is pretty clearly against American punctuation.
It is very easy to create the appearance of a changing consensus simply by asking again and hoping that a different and more sympathetic group of people will discuss the issue. This, however, is a poor example of changing consensus, and is antithetical to the way that Wikipedia works. Wikipedia"s decisions are not based on the number of people who showed up and voted a particular way on a particular day. It is based on a system of good reasons. Attempts to change consensus must be based on a clear engagement with the reasons behind the current consensus...
Furthermore, it isn"t "routinely dismissed", but debated at great length; the entire point PMAnderson/Septentrionalis is trying to make here is a form of straw man fallacy. It"s really easy to bash a scarecrow that represents an imagined censorious oligarchic hegemony conspiring to keep one person out of the limelight, and quite another to actually engage in a constructive discourse with fellow editors collaborating to make and maintain a useful style guideline for Wikipedia. The latter takes some actual effort. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:38, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
Forgive me for not wading through the entire discussion above and elsewhere, because I want to make one simple observation. I think the usefulness of logical quoting depends on the context. In cases where commas make a big difference, such as semantics or computer programming, logical quotes are a must. In other cases, such as when quoting romanized translations of Lao Tzu"s Tao te Ching, logical quotes are less useful. The decision to use or not use logical quotes should rest with the editors who introduce content into articles, not with a MOS that lays down a preference for everyone. I see some cases where logical quotes would look out of place and disgusting, and I also see examples where authors sensibly use logical quotes to eliminate equivocation (Saul Kripke comes to mind). Perhaps we should simply specify the benefits and drawbacks of both the styles and say that editors will have to agree on individual cases. Besides, if editors are debating over a particular use of logical/nonlogical quotes, they are paying greater attention to detail than the majority of editors at Wikipedia! —
I agree with SandyGeorgia and the many other similar comments. PMAnderson wrote that "the goal is to make the MOS a practical manual, describing the actual consensus of Wikipedian practice...." Well, that"s not my goal. If you wanted to describe actual practice, you"d note that many people continue to italicize quotations, some people can"t get over their (British) habit of using single quotation marks instead of doubles, etc. The MoS is prescriptive, not descriptive. It prescribes logical style for quotation marks, " instead of ", and unitalicized quotations. Those points should not be changed. JamesMLane
I just saw this discussion for the first time tonight, after I have modified a number of pages to punctuate as advocated in Chicago Manual of Style. This is how I learned to punctuate in school, and I never even bothered to check Wikipedia for a policy. I"m sure many others were also taught this way and use "illogical style" quotation marks without realizing it is against Wikipedia style guidelines (for example, I just found this user talk page). I, for one, think that Wikipedia should allow the Chicago style. It isn"t just opinion, it is an accepted way of writing. TK421 06:24, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
It should also be noted that over the last few months, I have edited a number of pages to make them follow CMOS. Some of these pages were even featured articles (such as Harry S. Truman). In looking over them, most of my edits still stand. Is this not a form of consensus? This suggests to me that many others find the Chicago style acceptable, and it should be incorporated as an acceptable style in Wikipedia. TK421 07:09, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Relax. I didn"t even know about this style guide when I made those changes, and I won"t make any more unless I see a change in policy. As far as representing "a form of consensus", look at the flow chart on Wikipedia:Consensus. Make an edit - Wait - Was the article edited further? - No - New consensus. Consensus does not only arise from discussions like this, but from actual practice. My point that some were featured articles indicates that these were not obscure articles, either. I think it is a compelling argument. TK421 17:41, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Then that represents a local consensus that no-one who edits that article objects. However, editing to conform to the CMOS does not have wikipedia-wide consensus, and the fact that your edits happened to make text conform to CMOS, and had local consensus, doesn"t mean that there"s even local consensus to follow CMOS generally. We explicitly don"t follow CMOS, and that has been established to have general consensus. That consensus can change, but there"s been no demonstration of that. Limited objections don"t mean that consensus is no longer valid. SamBC(talk) 20:39, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I realize this is trivial, but the subsequent Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Quotation_marks section states that punctuation should go inside quotes when it"s part of the quotation. So it seems to me that period in the example should be moved to right after the final word, it. I"m not sure enough to make the change, so I"m asking about it here. -Agyle 17:10, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
There was no doubt about the outcome. Wikipedia consensus to abandon logical quotation just because a handful of people don"t like it was not reached. At all. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 21:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
In fact, TinyMark disagrees with the present wording; it is not consensus among Wikipedians, far less among the users of English as a whole. That SMcCandlish still wants to get back at the professors of his elective courses is a pity; but it should not determine our guidance on the matter. Septentrionalis
Wikipedia has never been about changing the generally-accepted standards of anything. Where there are two generally-accepted ways to do something, the Wiki rule of thumb is to allow either method, so long as it is consistent within an article. We should show respect for both traditions and ask only for within-article consistency. Highly recommend amending MoS to this effect. Afaprof01 03:17, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
I absolutely agree 100% with you, Afaprof01! Wikipedia should allow standard, widely-used forms of punctuation in its articles. TK421 23:05, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
I"m very new to editing, but I find that this sentence should settle the argument: "scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision". I find that the goal of Wikipedia should be the same to that of scientific and technical publications in regards to precision, eventhough I was taught the typesetter rule in school. My question though, is what system most encyclopedias use?Resu ecrof 21:07, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
On page 278 of "The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage" in the section "PUNCTUATION WITH QUOTATION MARKS," it states: "Periods and commas, in American usage, always go inside the closing quotation marks, regardless of grammatical logic." Now if Wikipedia states that the opposite is true and disregards this common usage, it leads me to understand why teachers and professors refuse to let students reference Wikipedia; it promotes illiteracy.
No PMA, it"s question of moving on – towards a stable consensus that leaves bickering and small-minded national allegiances behind, along with merely sentimental attachment to one body of practice or another. On this and other matters, we simply have to consider what can be changed and what can"t be, and to form the best guidelines we can with those ineluctable limits in mind. The self-appointed obstructors of such work would be well advised to go away and do something else. Something productive, perhaps. What should Wikipedia be, if not essentially reformist, in the best sense? Where should discussion focused on rational reform in the service of excellence occur, if not exactly here? (Answer only if you support such efforts here, please. Otherwise take no part in a process you deprecate.)
Wikipedia is not a language reform movement; nor should we be. Even if this were a matter of thoughtless linguistic chauvinism (and Tony disagrees that it is a national difference at all), it is not the business of Wikipedia to compel our editors to the broad sunlit uplands of positive freedom which supposedly lie beyond "small-minded linguistic differences". Some readers and writers of English use logical punctuation; some use aesthetic punctuation. We may be able to persuade some editors to reconsider their choices in this matter; we cannot, and should not attempt to, do more. We should treat this as we treat color/colour, and move on. Septentrionalis
With national spellings, it is easy to tell the difference at a glance, one either knows that "centre" is a spelling mistake or Commonwealth English. The trouble with punctuation and quotes is that it can be difficult to tell which style is being used. Indeed as Wikipedia is optimised for readers, the chances are that many will get it wrong even if there is an in house style, unless they take the trouble to read the MOS, which is unlikely unless they are Wikipedia editors. --Philip Baird Shearer 07:58, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
See WP:CONSENSUS#"Asking the other parent": "It is very easy to create the appearance of a changing consensus simply by asking again and hoping that a different and more sympathetic group of people will discuss the issue. This, however, is a poor example of changing consensus, and is antithetical to the way that Wikipedia works. Wikipedia"s decisions are not based on the number of people who showed up and voted a particular way on a particular day. It is based on a system of good reasons." PS: MOS does not deny that two systems "exist", it simply prefers one over the other for precisely the same reasons that technical, scientific and other publications do so: logical punctuation is more precise. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:48, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
…both are correct; however they are different styles of written English. #1 is U.S. English while #2 is British English. Wikipedia tends to prefer the British English style since it"s, well, logical. What is present in the punctuation guideline right now is the consensus of users who use all varieties of written English. 哦， 是吗？
Hogwash. In the U.S., most punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. If you can"t figure out that a comma is used in a series, then it wouldn"t matter if it was inside or outside the quotes. If you can"t figure out that the sentence ends in a period, then the same. BUT DON"T EXPECT U.S. PERSONS WHO KNOW WHAT STANDARD U.S. ENGLISH GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION RULES COMMAND AND WHO WENT TO SCHOOL FOR THIRTEEN YEARS (PLUS FOUR YEARS OF COLLEGE), WHERE THOSE PERSONS HAD TO WRITE CORRECTLY, TO WRITE DIFFERENTLY HERE. Just write each article the correct way, use British for British articles, English for English, and maintain consistency within each article. But unless the casual user knows that there is a difference, he or she will write the way he or she was taught (assuming the person was taught correctly and is proficient in applying what was supposed to have been learned). For the average person who has gone to school, learned how to write correct, standard English, and then has found and wants to use Wikipedia, being forced to write English incorrectly does NOT seem LOGICAL! Bobopaedia 15:17, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
Well, YOU have missed the point again. FIRST, I WAS EMPHASIZING. So sorry it wan"t in midnight blue to suit you. Do you honestly think the average person is going to read all those archives. _ (Although I have.) _ "Precision in a particularly linguistic register?" WTF! Isn"t grammar and puctuation linguistic precision? You are an editor? How do you edit when something is perceived as incorrect? You baffle me.Bobopaedia 15:51, 30 November 2007 (UTC) _ So now it is not about grammar? Just make up something else. Perhaps we should also condone misspelling. What do you think people will do they see periods, commas, etc. in the wrong place? Think to themselves: "Oh. This has nothing to do with grammar, or punctuation, or spelling. It"s Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. But isn"t an encyclopedia supposed to use English correctly?" Yes, if it is going to be taken seriously. I know for a fact that in the U.S., teachers and school districts do not let their students use Wikipedia for research projects. One wonders why? INACCURACY! INACCURACY! INACCURACY! Bobopaedia 17:19, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia"s accuracy problems have nothing at all to do with puctuation style. And please lay off the screeching invective. WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND. Appeal to emotion is a fallacy. If you want to emphasize something, use italics instead of ASCII SCREAMING. Anyway, this issue has been hashed to death and beyond. The fact that most but not all informal US publications like newspapers and novels (and some non-US ones) prefer interior punctuation of quotations is of no particular consequence. The fact that even US-based formal publications that require precision and lack of ambiguity, such as medical and scientific journals, use exterior, logical puntuation tells us we are doing the right thing by also using that in the encyclopedia. — talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:04, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
I know that whether punctuation should be inside or out of quotes has been discussed before here, but not in relation to references. I completely understand the concept of "logical quotation," but nowhere do I see anything mentioning what applies to references. In wikipedia the cite template and sources page recommend having punctuation outside quotes such as in this example:
APA doesn"t seem to use quotes in its titling. I"m not sure why wikipedia style seems to go against three of the most widely used styles and put the punctuation outside of the quotation in references. Therefore, I propose that the style guide me modified to reflect the most common usage. This could be done by adding in a new section to the quotation marks section of the punctuation section noting that referencing follows different rules from text used in the body, and then modifying the cite template as well as the various examples littered around the help sections on referencing in wikipedia.Zeus1234 16:51, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
That"s the opinion of Merriam-Webster. I think that this has been discussed many times before. Wikipedia, after much discussion, prefers "logical quotation" - that is, to include punctuation within the quotation marks only when it comes from the quotation; to put it another way, Wikipedia believes that nothing should be put in a quote that is not part of it. So I would say: "BritandBeyonce said, "Note that the period and comma should be written inside the quotation marks."" But: ""Note that the period and comma should be written inside the quotation marks", said BritandBeyonce." Because the original source has a full stop at the end, if I change this to a comma that needs to go outside the quotation marks, to show that it isn"t part of the quote. This is also usual (though not universal) British style; most US sources, such as the one you have quoted, say otherwise, although logical quotation has a growing following in the US, particularly in technical writing (see, for example, Hacker Writing Style in the Jargon File). TSP (talk) 11:45, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I"ve been challenged when I put periods and commas inside quotation marks, based on Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation marks, that Wikipedia uses "logical quotation." I"ve never heard of this. I understand that putting periods and commas inside or outside of quotation marks is basically American vs. British usage. I would like to challenge this idea of "logical quotation": what is the source for it? It looks like it"s either from technical writing or something made up. What outside source is Wikipedia basing its style on? InkQuill (talk) 18:32, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
This is a god-damned thing that Wikipedia has made up. (And Tony seems to be stubborn as hell in trying to enforce it.) It"s in the guidelines (which only means that it is suggested) but it is not absolute. It is wrong. You can"t make up your own grammar rules. This has been discussed at length. What I and most do is follow the American English v. Brit/Euro English differences: If it is an American-specific article, follow American grammar; if Brit, follow Brit/Euro or whatever is correct for that language. Most importantly is to be consistent within articles. But I hardly ever find consistency. Tony will say it not U.S. (notice the periods) v. Brit. That"s his opinion. The evidence speaks for itself. Type the way you know is grammatically correct. ---- Bobopaedia (talk) 05:09, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
That was done after messaging with someone on Wikipedia and before I saw your response. Whatever timing was there was purely coincidental. I am not warring with you anymore on this issue. Bobopaedia (talk) 22:40, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
I feel I must weigh in on this. I understand the reasoning behind "logical quotation," and I agree that it has merit in coding and in technical writing, both of which have historical basis for using nonproportional typefaces, in which the spacing between letters does not vary and thus does not figure into readability considerations. As a typesetter, I also know that punctuation is not a "logical" process; it has entirely to do with readability. For typesetters, the rule is to put punctuation within quotes that does not rise above the baseline, such as periods and commas; and other punctuation, such as question marks, exclamation marks, semicolons, etc., outside unless the punctuation is part of the quoted string. As a typesetter, I see violations of this rule as jarring errors, and hard to ignore. Putting baseline punctuation outside quotemarks upsets the visual rhythm of the typesetting, thus affecting readability. While some argue that so-called "logical quotation" removes ambiguity, in reality a reader gets the sense of the sentence almost entirely from context. Placement of baseline punctuation is a letter-spacing issue, having to do with how marks are made and how we use our eyes. Exceptions can (and should) be made in technical writing (which Wikipedia isn"t), legal writing, and coding, all of which employ recursive reading practices that have little else to do with "why we read." row
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