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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