I don't think automatic insertion of things like that is good. Things
like that are so small, hard to define when they should actually be
applied, and dish out to many unexpected false positives.
For example...
That "P. ##" mentioned. Even if you used a regex like /\bP\. [0-9]+\b/
to make absolute sure that the P isn't the end of a word... What about this:
"A amazing feat was accomplished today by Andrew P. 100 people were
saved when he single handedly made a decision to drive his car under the
post of an about to fall water tower. While his car was sacrificed, it
prevented the water tower from crushing many innocent people.
Thankfully, Andrew came out with only minor bruises."
Even with the absolute best regex or testing you could possibly come up
with, that will still come up with a false positive, and a will
be inserted in between P. and 100, which are parts of two different
sentences. And because 99% of the people you expect it to /help/ don't
know about it, they will be at a loss to know why their sentence does
not wrap lines correctly like it normally would.
And even as someone who would know about it, I still wouldn't spot it,
and would to end up being utterly confused. Not to mention, I don't
feel like adding <nowiki/> tags into sentences where they should not be
needed. It adds even more cruft to the page than adding a nbsp tag.
Btw...
: isn't converted into a tab... It's converted into part of a definition
list... We call it indentation, but a list is actually being created.
And it is markup, leading like markup just as the space, and the 3 other
forms of leading line list markup are (*, #, ;, :).
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of:
-The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com)
-Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG)
-and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)
Dan Kindsvater wrote:
In the online (15th ed.) Chicago Manual of Style (comes right up on a google
search, and they give a free one-month subscription, btw), it's 7.42 and
7.43.
I'm with everyone here. I don't think the poor buggers have a chance in
WP:VP because they are all in favor of markup creep, but we'll see.
Dan
#wikia, #wikia-de, #wikiversity
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikia-l] Techs,I'd like a quick opinion on whether certain
pre-processingwhenediting is likel
Randy Kramer wrote:
* Is that scheme of (not) wrapping a universal standard? (I know
Strunk
and White is not the right resource, but is it documented in some similar
resource--I ask because I've never seen it.)
Without getting into a postmodernist discussion of whether or not a
universal
standard can be defined in the first place, the citation you are looking
for is
_Chicago Manual of Style_ (13th ed.), sections 6.53 - 6.56:
"Abbreviations used with numerals should not be separated from the
numerals"
"An enumerating letter or number . . . preferably should not be separated
from the beginning of what follows it"
"Avoid breaking before a numeral adjective following a personal name"
Etc.
My own opinion is that the nonbreaking spaces should be inserted by
MediaWiki
(no markup), just as leading colons are converted into tabs. Then the
hardcore
editors could override it with the existing "nowiki" tag. I write code
for a
living and don't really notice an extra "nbsp" here and there, but I know
that
I am in the minority there, and consequently I think we should err on the
side
of an easy-to-read edit window, as the guy from the Marvel Comics wiki
said.
The central wikia brags about the enormous length of Special:Listusers,
but
actually the overwhelming majority of those people make three edits and
then
disappear. That needs to stop.
--- "Ryan W"
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