Here's the word from a fr:wp user on apostrophes.

Summary: I dunno if we *can* make it work "as expected" (more than once in a paragraph) but it appears it would be a win for French-language MediaWiki users.

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Rémi Kaupp kaupp.remi@gmail.com Date: 27 Nov 2007 18:23 Subject: Parser : italics and apostrophes To: dgerard@gmail.com

Hello,

I have seen your message on foundation-l. I answer privately as I have not subscribed to this list.

On fr.wikipedia, we have this use of mixing apostrophes and italics. This happens quite often, for instance when quoting book titles, ship names, etc. all of which are usually put in italics. You often find stuff such as L'''idée'', or L'''Etoile'' (a ship name), etc.

This works fine unless you do it twice in a paragraph, as you can see on http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Korrigan/Brouillon6 . In such cases, our "workaround" is either to leave some space between the apostrophe and the italics (this is not satisfying, but this what beginners do by trial-and-error), or to use the curved apostrophe : ' . Ideally, we should always use this sort of apostrophe, but, as it is not on French keyboards (not on any keyboard I know, actually), 99% of contributors use the straight apostrophe. We place the curved apostrophe in the "special characters" box, and some people actually use it, but we prohibit it for page titles on fr.wikipedia, and leave up to the user to choose between normal and curved apostrophes for article content.

Not all wikis do this : on fr.wiktionary, where typography is more important, the straight apostrophe has been disused in favor of the curved one. But on most other wikis, the straight apostrophe is the main one used. I notice that the curved apostrophe is used on fr.wikipedia in two main instances : 1) when someone creates an article on a word processor and then pastes it into WP, 2) when the straight apostrophe conflicts with the italics / bold markup. In MediaWiki messages, where I've contributed a lot for translation, I have used only curved apostrophes so that it does not conflict with PHP / wiki markup.

Ideally, I think the parser should include this use of apostrophes + italics. I have seen that you (or other guys) are working on this for a new parser... good luck with this :-)

Cheers, Rémi Kaupp (User:Korrigan)