On 5/28/06, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
What I understand of the usage of the double apostrophe is, that it is always used in the middle of a word. This means that this could be fixed by not interpreting "markup" when it is in the middle of a word.
Do you mean in general, or only for page titles? Changing that rule in general would surely break heaps of articles across all the Wikipedias. I imagine various products would have italics for half a word and so forth. But perhaps it could be enabled on a per-Wiki basis?
Other possibilities might be inclusion of a nothing-character (some'<nothing/>'word, or even some'<!---->'word) or a flag whereby the page title maps some other character/sequence of characters (such as the double quote) onto the taboo sequence (two apostrophes). This latter suggestion would be like what we were discussion a month or two ago about fixing lower case characters at the start of titles.
In fact it could be generalised:
{{Titlemap|"|''}} (titlemap|double quote|two apostrophes) could, for example, request that that substitution take place in the title. All pages linking to this one would still have to use double quotes rather than two apostrophes, however. It's a kludge though.
Failing that, I can't think of much. I'm actually surprised that there isn't a way of easily producing the '' sequence other than <nowiki>. I suppose it's a side-effect of the less-than-optimal choice of '' for italics and ''' for bold - if two different characters had been chosen (say __ for bold), then you could produce a '' with '''' and you could produce a __ with ____. Then, bold italics would be either __''bolditalics''__ or ''__italicsbold__'' . But anyway.
Steve