2013/9/14 Stephan Stiller <[email protected]> > This tradition is persistant. >> >> Persistent where? >> > This is already replied within my message you quote here. > > Lots of people >> >> Lots of people who >> > Same remark. > > So there are "many" contributors, on the English Wikipedia. What does > "many" mean? I doubt double spacing of sentences is majority usage for * > any* community these days (note that contextually I'm talking about the > US right now – but if someone knows about another locale where this is or > remains common practice, I'll welcome information). But you originally > wrote that a period "will then need to be followed by two spaces", so > you're stating a *need*. >
You've quoted the sentence out of its context (note the "then" word which indicates this context). I do not support this practice. But it's a fact that it persists and MOST articles in Englosh Wikipedia are edited or redacted like this even if it's clearly not needed for rendering or interpretation, And not even needed while editing because it dors not bring more clarity. Those spaces are just like spaces at end of lines. There are also extra spaces not really needed used for indending : in the wii syntax ony the first space of lines has a meaning for creating a block in monospaced fonts, and in which case all other spaces will be preserved to create indentation like when presenting source code but it has a very limited usage. Wikipedia is not the only place where it occurs. In fact you can look at MANY sites in English and look at how their HTML code is created. Or look at MANY text documents or Word documents in English, and still most of them use these double space after sentence ending period. Most emails also use this. Most RFC's are written like this. The texts of many famous licences (like the GPL v2 or v3, or the Microsoft EULA) also use this. Sometimes it is use as well in documents created in US in other languages than English. And sometimes the practice contaminates native users of other languages outside US. All these users perceive this as a "need". For now the practice is so common that it's illusory for us trying to conveince them that it is really not needed. It's a subject of taste. And you cannot convince people about their taste. It exactly like conventions for indenting source code. Every coder has its taste, and some projects are strong about their code indentation style and document it as a required standard. You cannot alone come into a project and insist on changing it without irritating them, when they have also done most of the useful job for the project. I don't like it, but I accept it (and most of the time I don't care in fact if it has no visible effect on rendering.. So yes the practice is persistant even if it is not needed and has no effects in HTML (most of the time, except in monospaced code blocks). I've seen some arguments in favor of double-space after period saying that it allows plain-text distinction bteween sentence ending periods and abbreviations in the middle of a sentence. It's becuse the same FULL STOP character is overriden with many distinct meanings. But it is not convincing because frequently the abbreviation dot also occurs at end of sentences and a single FULL STOP is written for noting both (people won't write two FULL STOP characters).
