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:
How do people write articles with boxes?
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?
- What changed the boxes to question marks?
phma [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Sunday 01 September 2002 01:52, koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
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.
That answers one question: how they write boxes. It doesn't answer how to explain to them how to get rid of the boxes, or how the boxes turned into question marks.
BTW, I tried googling for various terms on that page and didn't find it.
phma
Pierre Abbat wrote:
On Sunday 01 September 2002 01:52, koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
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.
That answers one question: how they write boxes. It doesn't answer how to explain to them how to get rid of the boxes, or how the boxes turned into question marks.
BTW, I tried googling for various terms on that page and didn't find it.
The simplest explanation for this would be that the person is writing their article/s in word with 'smart quotes' etc turned on so it's inserting the character coding that the browsers don't recognise. They don't see them themselves because their computer is perfectly well equipped to reproduce them. The other thing is that if your computer does not have a particular font?character set installed, it might not know how to display it so it'll use the question marks instead. When I look at articles with Asian characters in them I just see a string of question marks because my computer does not have the font to read them. I'm assuming that the person creating these characters has the font installed, so they see the intended result...
The only way to get rid of them is not to use the font...
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