[Wikipedia-l] Box characters and question marks

[koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com]

The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in text from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy" quotation marks etc.  I always assume it to be the result of a copyright violation and google-test it (which I'll go do now).  That would explain all three of your questions below--where they come from, why the contributor doesn't see them, and why they don't display.

There may be other explanations, which I'd like to hear.... (honestly)

kq

You Wrote:
>I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes in them, 
>and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk page 
>including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128 do i emit 
>loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all the boxes 
>have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:
>
>1. How do people write articles with boxes?
>
>2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as boxes. They see 
>them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to them how to 
>avoid writing boxes?
>
>3. What changed the boxes to question marks?
>
>phma
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