On 6/19/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
And I still say we should just use ''. What we want _is_ two consecutive apostrophes -- we just don't want them _parsed_ by the wiki engine. Thus, they need to be escaped, which is exactly what '' does.
Or, as pointed out, ''
I was thinking about possible changes to the MediaWiki parsing engine to accommodate this better (like changing the reinterpretation of '''' from bold+' to ''), but I don't think many of them are good. The main confusion with suggestions like yours is being able to easily talk about the category etc in question:
* Is the name of the category "actually" foo''bar and it just happens to display as foo''bar ? * Is the name of the category "actually" foo''bar, and we put a page in that category with the hackish wikimarkup [[Category:foo''bar]] ?
Actually, on the MediaWiki question, it *would* theoretically be possible to just ignore all attempted formatting within [[Article]] or [[Category:]] links wouldn't it? Since we don't support formatting in page names (and are unlikely to with that syntax anytime soon), it seems conceivable that [[Category:Foo''bar]] should take that name literally and not attempt to interpret it as italics, which wouldn't work anyway...
Steve