Or is there some other problem?
You have to view localization problems. Example in Russian ndash is absent, there are only mdash and hyphen. Сurly-quotes (and embedded сurly-quotes) are also complex thing in various languages and typographical styles.
In Russian Wikipedia we use javascript tool for "typography" text befor submit, i. e. it's user-side tool (user can make certain transformations to whole text or only highlighted text, or nothing). The script is "open", so can be modified by our sysops, since it sits in the source of ru:MediaWiki:Summary (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Summary)
See also * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark