Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:10:23 UTC
It would be nice if Mediawiki could get a “Smart Quotes (and Apostrophes)” ability. I don’t care much if it would change the characters in the source or if it only changed " and ' for display. MW should of course ignore straight marks that are code themselves (Wiki markup or HTML, and inside <source/>). Several [http://www.poppyware.com/dunham/smartQuotes.html algorithms] have been published, so no need to reinvent the wheel, but if you assume certain style guides be followed, they may even be simplified and leave no ambiguous situations. (The Manual of Style for the English Wikipedia, for instance, requires double quotation marks used in the logic style.) I would prefer if only " and ' would be converted, not character SGML/HTML/XML references, but that would only work on the code and not the display level of course.
/me notes when I type a " I expect it to be a ", not some smart quote thing. Some wiki's (wikinews in particular) have policies against using smart quotes in articles.
I would not enjoy this feature either, but it could easily be added by an extension, either at save time, or parse time. I've changed the product to MediaWiki extensions accordingly.
Wikinews and English Wikipedia advice against typographic quotation marks simply because users can’t be expected to enter them correctly and consistently. A smart quotes feature would eliminate that concern. There are, however, also people who actually like straight quotes better, but that also depends on the font – they might be okaish with some sans serif typefaces (as in the standard skin Monobook), but they are always ugly with serif faces. A " or ' surrounded by whitespace (or punctuation) on both sides should probably not be converted. The extension should be language-aware.
