Here's the word from a fr:wp user on apostrophes.
Summary: I dunno if we *can* make it work "as expected" (more than
once in a paragraph) but it appears it would be a win for
French-language MediaWiki users.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rémi Kaupp <kaupp.remi(a)gmail.com>
Date: 27 Nov 2007 18:23
Subject: Parser : italics and apostrophes
To: dgerard(a)gmail.com
Hello,
I have seen your message on foundation-l. I answer privately as I have
not subscribed to this list.
On fr.wikipedia, we have this use of mixing apostrophes and italics.
This happens quite often, for instance when quoting book titles, ship
names, etc. all of which are usually put in italics. You often find
stuff such as L'''idée'', or L'''Etoile'' (a ship
name), etc.
This works fine unless you do it twice in a paragraph, as you can see
on
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Korrigan/Brouillon6 . In
such cases, our "workaround" is either to leave some space between the
apostrophe and the italics (this is not satisfying, but this what
beginners do by trial-and-error), or to use the curved apostrophe : '
. Ideally, we should always use this sort of apostrophe, but, as it is
not on French keyboards (not on any keyboard I know, actually), 99% of
contributors use the straight apostrophe. We place the curved
apostrophe in the "special characters" box, and some people actually
use it, but we prohibit it for page titles on fr.wikipedia, and leave
up to the user to choose between normal and curved apostrophes for
article content.
Not all wikis do this : on fr.wiktionary, where typography is more
important, the straight apostrophe has been disused in favor of the
curved one. But on most other wikis, the straight apostrophe is the
main one used. I notice that the curved apostrophe is used on
fr.wikipedia in two main instances : 1) when someone creates an
article on a word processor and then pastes it into WP, 2) when the
straight apostrophe conflicts with the italics / bold markup. In
MediaWiki messages, where I've contributed a lot for translation, I
have used only curved apostrophes so that it does not conflict with
PHP / wiki markup.
Ideally, I think the parser should include this use of apostrophes +
italics. I have seen that you (or other guys) are working on this for
a new parser... good luck with this :-)
Cheers,
Rémi Kaupp
(User:Korrigan)