Wiktionary talk:Votes/2013-02/Typographic vs ASCII punctuation in policies

Start of the vote

Let us keeping postponing the vote while significant discussion is ongoing. When the discussion seems over or mostly over, the vote can be started. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:21, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

This versus the other vote

See Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2013-02/Disallow typographic punctuation in policies#Better styled as a choice?.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:23, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

ASCII

Why does “w:ASCII” figure so prominently in the question? Our pages use the UTF-8 (Unicode) character set. The neutral typewriter punctuation is found in ASCII, Unicode, and many other text encodings.

The actual issues that seem to concern editors are difficulty of text entry (dunno why they’re not pushing for Sampa vs. IPA), appearance onscreen, and a few others. ASCII is irrelevant. —Michael Z. 2013-02-15 22:37 z

I somehow liked the phrase "ASCII quotation marks" better. I admit that google:"typewriter quotation marks" finds significantly more hits than google:"ASCII quotation marks", two times as many by my search results.

"ASCII" means that they are within the 7-bit ASCII subset of Unicode.

I am afraid both terms have unintended connotations, unintended by me anyway. "ASCII" may suggest availability to ASCII-only computers (presumably "good"), while "typewriter" may suggest they pertain to outdated technology that sees reduced use today (presumably "bad"). --Dan Polansky (talk) 23:09, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Typewriter denotes such glyphs by their origin, and “typewriting” or “typing” is the only functional name I can think of for writing that is neither typographical nor manuscript. Maybe “keyboarding” could substitute, but I’ve never heard of keyboard quotation marks. That this style of punctuation is a skeuomorphic remnant of the last century-and-a-half of mechanical typewriting is its defining nature. I’m not sure there is any reason to consider that negative in itself, or to avoid the notion. The hard practicalities of text entry is also exactly the main reason that this style of marks is favoured by some.

Neutral quotation marks is visually descriptive of the marks themselves. But like its synonym, dumb quotation marks, it is a reference to these marks’ lesser adequacy.

While ASCII may have been a relevant reference at one time, what “ASCII-only” computers are being used during this century? Who even learns what ASCII is, these days? ASCII is a historical blip in a world that happens to be filled with Victorian keyboards. —Michael Z. 2013-02-17 12:26 z

“Whether to use”

So does a vote in favour mean that everyone is required to enter typographic punctuation in policies, or that they are allowed to? —Michael Z. 2013-02-15 22:39 z

Required. - -sche (discuss) 22:55, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for striving to keep this a fair and balanced vote! —Michael Z. 2013-02-17 12:35 z

This question does not make much sense to me. If a supermajority prefers one thing over the other one in this vote, future proposals for policy page changes are likely to conform to that preference. "Allowed" and "disallowed" makes sense in the mainspace, but much less in policy pages, where edits are vote-controlled. --Dan Polansky (talk) 23:07, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I think settling the issue for policy pages would be a good thing. However, I don’t see how a straw poll about “preference” is likely to accomplish this. —Michael Z. 2013-02-17 12:35 z