[This project is on hold until the ugly sans serif font and compulsory underlines are fixed. In the meantime I shall just fix hyphens used as dashes, and the like.]

I’m quota, the pedantic alter ego of a writer, trying to find a good compromise style for quotes. I’m editing random pages to gauge reactions (almost entirely positive, so far—it seems to be only ‘computer people’ who think straight quotes—or apostrophes at both ends of a word or phrase—are acceptable).

I shall put together a proposed guideline in due course, but for the moment, a good ‘mid-Atlantic English’ style which seems to be liked by most might be:

• Use double quotes for a direct, attributed, quotation: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”, said Winston. In the Wikipedia source, these would be straight double-quotes and converted to readable ones on display

• use single quotes for calling out phrases (Fowler’s ‘decorative quotation’), or for an inner (nested) quotation. In the Wikipedia source, these can be straight single quotes (ASCII apostrophes), rendered on display

• apostrophes should also be rendered by Wikipedia on display, except for leading ones, for which Wikipedia probably should provide an editing notation.

To illustrate the last point, using straight quotes, the following is hard to read (and almost ambiguous):

in '96, the editors' excuse was just as feeble

and needs to be displayed as:

in ’96, the editors’ excuse was just as feeble

(you'll need to use a decent font to see the difference, as Wikipedia used to) where Wikipedia could automate the right-hand one but not the left. A possible editing shorthand for this might be:

in &a;96, the editors' excuse was just as feeble

quota

/sandbox