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The article refers to the dash character, which of course has a well-established meaning. But people often use the word dash to refer to the hyphen character. This has been true for a long time, and is even more widespread with the rise of the internet. (Example: "The web address is oak dash valley dash hotel dot com.")
I understand the structure of the article, and I'm sure it's consistent with the structure of other articles describing each character. But I think this common usage should also be acknowledged.This may not be a "correct" usage, but it's a common and widespread. An encyclopedia should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. I'm not suggesting diluting the detailed description. But the article deserves a separate section to describe this this common and widespread usage of dash referring to hyphen.
@
Richardchaven:, welcome to Wikipedia. One of the first lessons you will learn is that if you want anything done around here, you have to do it yourself! We are all volunteers. Normally you would update the article yourself but updating tables can be a little bit risky. So may I suggest draft some text to go in the article, put it here, then someone will show you how to add it. Thank you. --
John Maynard Friedman (
talk)
00:33, 15 February 2021 (UTC)reply
No obvious violation of WP:NPOV or WP:NOTGUIDE
@
John Maynard Friedman: I am reverting
this edit of yours as I cannot see that either WP:NPOV or WP:NOTGUIDE is violated. What of point of view do you think is advocated? And NOTGUIDE says
Describing to the reader how people or things use or do something is encyclopedic; instructing the reader in the imperative mood about how to use or do something is not.
There is no required limit to descriptions of "how people or things use or do something", including detailed use of the numeric encoding of HTML that you find excessive.
Also, your mention of "when en dashes are used in phrasing" is unnecessarily obscure. "Phrasing", per
Wikt:phrasing § Noun is "The way a statement is put together, particularly in matters of style and word choice." This covers nearly all uses of the en dash. Perhaps the sentence could read
It is only when en dashes are used in setting off parenthetical expressions – such as this one – that they take spaces around them.
@
Peter M. Brown: the npov challenge was the description of spaced ndash as doing the job of emdash, implying that the latter is the correct or reference form. Maybe in the US it is but not elsewhere.
The notguide challenge was to tell readers how to encode the hex or decimal values as HTML. Seriously?
True, I should not have expressed it in Wikivoice. I will rephrase it later today to make clear whose opinion it is. [I highly recommend his book, btw. It is free to borrow from the archive.org library.] But just as a an OR observation: tightset emdashes were the norm in Victorian England; they are vanishingly rare today unless the publication has a substantial US market. Nobody made a rule that spaced endashes should be the new normal, typographers just preferred it. --
John Maynard Friedman (
talk)
12:13, 22 July 2021 (UTC)reply
Comment. I'm not sure increasing use of spaced endashes can be attributed to typographer preference as much as the transition from traditional typesetting to DTP software and autocorrect/autoformatting settings. Personal observation so take it with a grain of salt (and obviously not citable), but I've found that knowledge of how and when to use endashes vs. emdashes vs. hyphens is pretty uncommon even among people who do DTP and layout as a profession (mostly speaking of trade publishing and marcom). —
Carter (
talk)
12:45, 22 July 2021 (UTC)reply
@
Peter M. Brown: I couldn't find a clever way to fix it, so I have (more or less) reverted to status quo ante. Given that there is a section on en-dash v em-dash – and it is flagged at the beginning of the section – I decided that it would be labouring the point. I should point out that my 'more or less' means that I have discarded the opening words that took unspaced em-dash as the starting point for analysis.
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Tcr25: you are probably right about "the facts on the ground", but
Robert Bringhurst (a noted Canadian typographer) is rather emphatic on the subject:
In typescript, a double hyphen (--) is often used for a long dash. Double hyphens in a typeset document are a sure sign that the type was set by a typist, not a typographer. A typographer will use an em dash, three-quarter em, or en dash, depending on context or personal style. The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.[1]
I propose changing the 5x column of the Unicode table to include a "standard" letter as well. This would highlight the vertical position of the different forms of dash. An upper case M seems a suitable choice — as in M----- vs. M____ —
GhostInTheMachinetalk to me12:09, 14 January 2023 (UTC)reply
I understand it's Wikipedia policy to use en-dashes for coordinate terms, but in this sentence, it makes no sense to use en-dashes, since it's an example of places where hyphens are used instead. As such, this is is confusing to read:
I had changed it to hyphens, but it got reverted (on 2019-08-21), and I disagree with the reasoning behind the reversion. Like, put a [sic] after each such hyphen if you want, but it's an example, so it should be shown as is, warts and all. IMHO, YMMV, etc.
FuturSimple (
talk)
17:33, 18 March 2023 (UTC)reply
New York-London flight
New York-London flight under "En dash § relationships and connections" doesn't make sense:
It states that "New York-London flight" could be misconstrued as a New flight from York to London, and suggests the use of the phrase "New York-to-London". This phrasing has the exact same issue. Should we just use an example other than New York and forget the whole ambiguity bit?
EntirelyOnline (
talk)
19:16, 15 May 2023 (UTC)reply
Use of en-dashes for description of/elaboration on listed items
Wikipedia, including this article (§"See also"), uses en-dashes to define, elaborate on, and describe items in numbered and bulleted lists; however this article makes no reference to this use case. This use case should be added—either describing it or providing a link elsewhere that does.
SMikutsky (
talk)
16:05, 26 July 2023 (UTC)reply
Suspended section "Typing the characters". Wikipedia is not a manual.
I have temporarily commented out the section "Typing the characters". As it stood, it is an egregious violation of
WP:NOTMANUAL and
WP:DUE. It is bogged down in the detail of different OSs, different keyboards, different keyboard mappings. How is it encyclopedic?
𝕁𝕄𝔽 (
talk)
14:07, 23 March 2024 (UTC)reply
What am missing? I don't see any reference to specific OSs.
WP:NOTMANUAL does discourage use of the imperative mood, but the imperative-mood use of the verb "see", present to help the reader find his/her way around in Wikipedia, is surely justified. The phrase "it became common" introduces a legitimate historical claim that is defective in that no source is provided, but that calls for
Template:Citation needed, not for suppression of the claim. "It may also be possible ..." also requires elaboration but, again, editors may be be able to provide it.
The sentence beginning "It is common ..." is sourced to
Robert Bringhurst. I am unfamiliar with his work — perhaps it can be used to support more of the section's claims?
My concern is really that the section is a
wp:cfork of
Unicode input,
QWERTY,
QWERTZ,
AZERTY,
MsWindows,
iOS,
Linux,
ChromeOS, etc. To give instructions on how to use Windows, iOS, Android, Linux to enter symbols is (IMO) just
WP:UNDUE. Yes, we should use the
WP:See also to point readers at this material but it is crazy to replicate it (in a variety of forms and detail) at each article about every symbol. It also seems probable that the whole thing has been technically obsoleted by autocorrect, which replaces a pair of hyphen-minuses with an mdash and a space hyhen-minus space with a spaced ndash.
Bringhurst is the touchstone reference for modern typography: you can borrow it via the
WP:WikiLibrary. I can't recommend it too highly.
It doesn't contain anything (that I can recall) about how to do typesetting (or electronic equivalent) – nor would I expect that it would, for the same reasons as I've set out above. --
𝕁𝕄𝔽 (
talk)
21:29, 23 March 2024 (UTC)reply