Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive (quotes and quote marks)

• See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/quotation and punctuation

Quotation marks with other punctuation

When punctuating quoted passages, put punctuation where it belongs, inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on the meaning, not rigidly within the quotation marks. This is the British style.

This sound appealing; even as an American, I have never quite accepted the idea that punctuation should go inside the quotes as often as style manuals seems to insist. I'm not clear what the British alternative is, however. Are there any links here, or could someone provide a brief set of examples? --Ryguasu

Example added. Ortolan88

Thanks. How about punctuation for As John Doe points out, "The man with the most cheese molds the least." Americans would obsessively put the period inside the quotation marks. Is this true for British folks as well? --Ryguasu

Um, there's no obsession about it. If it is a complete sentence, the punctuation goes inside in both countries. The MOS has always said that. Ortolan88

Ortolan88 is right. If you were to be perfectly logical about it, you would write

As John Doe points out, "The man with the most cheese molds the least.".

because there the quotation is a complete sentence (requiring a period) while it sits at the end of another complete sentence (requiring its own period). I will often use just this style, since I'm a hyperlogical person, but most people regard it as too ugly, so the usual style convention is to keep only the period inside the quotation marks. (It might just as easily have gone the other way, however.) What distinguishes the two countries' systems is:

John Doe called him "the man with the most cheese".

Here the quotation is not a complete sentence (thus requiring no period), so the style above is the one demanded by pedantic logic. Since this style is not ugly, we can use it in ordinary writing, and the British do; the Americans, however, move the period inside the quotation marks, because ... I dunno why, they just do. — Toby 09:14 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

As I understand it, it is a prejudice of American printers that little bits like periods look "bad" hanging outside the "quotes". I don't agree and I have to catch myself when I'm writing commercially to do it the American way, but in everything I write for myself I do it British style and I was delighted to note when I was working up the Manual of Style that British was already the convention in Wikipedia. Ortolan88

Question re: quotation marks

In transcribing the words, for instance, of hymns or poetry, it is frequently necessary to use a single quotation mark to indicate a missing letter, o'er, or o’er, for scansion. My preference is for the latter, as, given the context of the usage, it runs together better. Nevertheless, I can see that someone a little more experienced in Wikipunctuating may be able to offer guidance. Ought I change my solitary submission thus far to the general style of ', or is ’ acceptable? Wooster 11:01 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

’ is an HTML entity, and will not show on all systems. Best to stick to ' , for the immediate future at least -- Tarquin 11:10 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

There is an alternative; ’ as in "o’er" is more acceptable as an HTML entity. But I'm still in the "o'er" camp myself. -- John Owens 11:40 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

format for quotes

I was taught that punctuation goes before the end quote, but I have seen countless times on wikipedia the punctuation going after the end quote. Was I taught incorrectly? Or have times changed?

the so called "Zagreb Bible," which
 or
the so called "Zagreb Bible", which

the inscription read "Manchu State Postal Administration;"
 or
the inscription read "Manchu State Postal Administration";

SMOP is an acronym for "Small Matter of Programming". 
 or
SMOP is an acronym for "Small Matter of Programming."

Kingturtle 05:27, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think in the US it's "blah," and in some other countries it's "blah",

I prefer the latter but use the former to be more consistent with most editors in en. Dori | Talk 05:32, Dec 31, 2003 (UTC)

Kingturtle is correct - gramatically (in the US, at least), it's preferred that the puncutation goes before the quotation mark. As a computer engineer, I cringe every time I have to write it that way. --Raul654 07:17, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think "blah," is the older and more pleasing usage, though this is only an approximation of the real typesetting solution which is to place the quotes further to the left so they're partially above the comma. In recent years, especially outside the US, the form "blah", has become more common as it's clearer from a parsing point of view, since it clearly shows whether the punctuation is part of the quote or not. I think either one is acceptable on Wikipedia, and would discourage changing one to the other. --Delirium 08:22, Dec 31, 2003 (UTC)

For me the crucial factor is whether we are talking about speech or phrase/referred word.

So-and-so said: "I think I will do this-and-that," and went on to do so.

Or the other variety of "quote", where one is just putting "quotes" around a word or phrase. -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 09:38, Dec 31, 2003 (UTC)

IMO, it doesn't matter whether the punctuation is inside or outside the quotes except in cases where the "quoted" material is supposed to be exact or verbatim. E.g., "On the C prompt type ‘dir’, then press ENTER, and then you'll see a list of the files in the current directory."

It should be mentioned that even in the U.S. putting it on the inside of the quote only applies to commas and periods; colons, semicolons etc. should go on the outside regardless. - Hephaestos 17:26, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)

"blah," is correct. (Blah blah blah.) is correct. Blah blah, (but not blah blah). is correct. Blah blah; blah blah: "Blah, blah blah." is correct. I like to watch The O.C., so I've ditched Angel. I like to watch The O.C. {no period after period in itals or quotes.} Peter said, "Jimmy said, 'What the heck?' and I agree." Peter said, "Jimmy said, 'What the heck?' " {note space between single and double quote at end of sentence.}jengod 00:51, Jan 29, 2004 (UTC)

Introductory quotations

It looks like we're heading into more edit wars involving introductory quotations. I have used them fairly often when they provide a familiar and immediate frame of reference to the topic, usually a topic in popular culture (e. g. mad scientist, melodrama) or when the topic is of interest chiefly because it is the subject of the quotation I begin with (Lizzie Borden, Old King Cole). If none of these quotations are appropriate, I would like to get a clear sense from the community that they are forbidden. Otherwise, I mean to begin restoring them. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Here are my thoughts. Wikipedia is intended as an encyclopedia. In the encyclopedic style of writing, the first sentence or paragraph are essentially definitions of the entry. This identifies the topic immediately so that someone who is interested in information about a specific topic knows immediately whether she has found a relevant article--most readers are at the article because they have specifically requested to be there. Creative writing, such as for magazine articles, needs to draw in a reader who happens upon the article by chance--the reader is there by accident-- and so the article's first sentence or paragraph must show the reader that the article will provide entertainment or must draw in the reader by intriguing the reader with a mystery or a question. Quotations such as "Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks" or "They dared to laugh at my theories...!" are intriguing and are certainly relevant detailed information about a topic but they don't define the subject and hence are inappropriate as the first sentence or paragraph in an encyclopedic article. (And although Old King Cole presumably exists only because he's the topic of a nursery rhyme, still, the rhyme itself does not define who he is.) Elf 16:19, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think they should be included, but not in the first sentence. That really needs to be kept for defining what the article is about, and a quotation is not going to do that. Angela. 03:03, Feb 29, 2004 (UTC)

I agree. Is Lizzie Borden about the woman or about the poem? In fact, even if it were the latter, it would still be more felicitous to have an introductory sentence before sailing into the verse. --Phil 16:50, Mar 1, 2004 (UTC)

If formatted right, an introductory quotation does not read like the first sentence, even if it is, sequentially. I think of them more as illustrations in text rather than with a picture. -- Smerdis of Tlön 16:00, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Quotation marks: New policy proposal

• With quotation marks, we have no rigid rule. Some users prefer using one style (punctuation goes outside the quotation marks when quoting only part of a sentence, but inside when quoting a compete sentence), while other prefer another style (punctuation always goes inside quotation marks).

I prefer the "rigid rule" that is presently in place, not because it is a rigid rule, but because it gives guidance to editors, that is, if the punctuation is part of the quote, quote it, if not part of the quote, don't quote it. Keep in mind, that which is frequently forgotten in these discussions, the purpose of any manual of style is consistency. This proposal will result in inconsistency and gives no guidance to editors. Contributors in general don't pay much attention to the Manual of Style so far as I can tell. This is good, because a lot of the Manual of Style is intimidating to people not accustomed to editorial markup.

If I am reading correctly, this "no rigid rule" paragraph is the only part of this proposed policy that is actually new, the rest is pretty much as it already is in the Manual of Style. Ortolan88 03:24, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC) PS -- I should state my bias. I wrote the first draft of the Manual of Style, basing it on what I found in the Wikipedia at that time, and the rule about "logical quotes" was in that first draft because many carefully written articles, including mine, already used it. Ortolan88

Have to agree. Seems like we should just pick one system and move on. (Also, it seems like we already have, so lets.) Chuck 04:17, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Keep in mind that if you're quoting several paragraphs, there should be quotes at the beginning of each paragraph, but only at the end of the last paragraph. For longer quotations, an indented style may be better. Since quotations are already marked by quotation marks or indentations, they need not be italicized.
• It is probably best to use the "double quotes" for most quotations, as they are easier to read on the screen. Use 'single quotes' for "quotations 'within' quotations," or to mark words for attribution.
• Note that if a word appears in an article with single quotes, such as 'abcd', the Wikipedia:Searching facility will find it only if you search for the word with quotes (when trying this out with the example mentioned, remember that this article is in the Wikipedia namespace). Since this is rarely desirable, this problem is an additional reason to use double quotes, for which this problem does not arise. It may even be a reason to use double quotes for quotations within quotations as well.
• For uniformity and to avoid complications use straight quotation marks and apostrophes, not curved (smart) ones or grave accents:
  • Correct: ' "
  • Incorrect: ‘ ’ “ ” `
• If you are pasting text from Microsoft Word, remember to turn off the smart quotes feature by unmarking this feature in AutoEdit and "AutoEdit during typing"! [1]. Many other modern word processors have a smart quotes setting - please read the appropriate documentation for your editor.
• The grave accent (`) is also used as a diacritical mark to indicate a glottal stop; however, the straight quote should be used for this purpose instead (e.g., Hawai'i, not Hawai`i).

I'm planning on adding this revised policy in a week if there are no objections. Comments? [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 03:07, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

Except for the punctuation issue (addressed above) I'm fine except for the Hawaii example. Why are we even addressing a rare character here. My understanding of that character, also used for other Hawaiian words, is that the preference of character use is (i) the Unicode character (there is a specific unicode character defined), (ii) opening left apostrophe, (iii) grave accent, (iv) straight apostrophe. Straight apostrophe might be the most cross-platform, but is the least accurate. Anyway, is this really the right way to open up the rare character can-of-worms. There are plenty of other characters and diacritic marks we would need to address as well. We can start a section to address such characters, but it doesn't belong with quotes. Chuck 04:17, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't see what this change would improve. Maurreen 04:33, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The only real change here is removal of long-standing Wikipedia preference for logical quotation. But editors have long time been writing articles by this standard and correcting articles to fit this standard. As with any change here, consensus is needed. And I don't see that occurring.

I agree with Chuck on the Hawai'i issue, which is controversial and not clear and also not altogether folllowed. Does this mean that when referring to Hawaiian names in an English context one should use the straight quotation rather than the grave, or that even when quoting Hawai'ian forms natively one should do the same? I don't think the latter is intended, or at least would not be understood now as being a reasonable rule. That should be made clear. There is an increasing tendency in general for use of rarer Unicode characters to appear throughout Wikipedia as fonts increasingly support them. I have seen use of the ‘ character in Hawaiian names and the only objector I've seen to it backed down at once when the user made an issue of it, even saying that if the editor wanted to persist in using it against the standard, he'd support the user. It is hard to remember that even as short a time as three years is was considered rather daring on the web to display even common characters outside of ISO Latin-1 without special downloadable fonts and how a few cranks were still raving away on usenet claiming that Unicode couldn't work and that no-one was using it. That no-one is generally addressing the matter of rare characters may indicate that there is no problem to be addressed, that is, that those using rare characters are largely doing so with reasonable restraint and issues raised are being solved reasonably by individual discussions.

Jallan 17:32, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

May I suggest that Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes) should be renamed to something like Wikipedia:Manual of Style (punctuation), and any policies in this area sould join it there.Susvolans 17:05, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Don't think so. Punctuation is pretty much the first line of "style" and should remain in the main body of the Manual. Ortolan88 18:02, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

OK, then: bring the dashes to the main body, too. They still belong together. Susvolans 11:21, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Re: Use straight quotation marks and apostrophes

Am I right that, despite this policy, what I have done with the mark „ in the Spanish-language text at Image:Fuero.JPG is correct, since I am transcribing a document? -- Jmabel | Talk 09:52, Nov 12, 2004 (UTC)

If you are transcribing, then reproduce exactly what you see there. If you then translate it into English, do not use that exotic punctuation. Chameleon 10:28, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Pardon me, but at Hawai‘i related subject articles, we have been using the left-quote-style ‘okina, because its appearance is preferred both in Hawaiian and Hawaiian English. I think an exception should be stated for situations where certain conventions are preferred even in English standards, such as in Hawaiian English. We do not use "Hawai`i", nor "Hawai'i". We use "Hawai‘i". - Gilgamesh 08:44, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think the ‘okina is a different issue. It's not really an English apostrophe or speech mark. Chameleon 14:07, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Part of the reason for using straight marks is consistency and part is technological issues. Not everyone uses browsers or operating systems that support the extended Unicode characters. See Quotation mark#Curved quotes in English for a good explanation. The MediaWiki Handbook also provides a list of safe characters at Help:Special characters. And if you read down further in the document you will see that double quotes can be entered by using the entities „ and ” („ and ”). —Mike 20:16, Nov 13, 2004 (UTC)

I have removed User:FoeNyx's additional exotic quotation characters from the MoS and also replaced the statement about use of the straight quotation mark in Hawaian. This was not done without discussion.

The Hawaiian matter was discussed some time ago at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style archive (pronunciation)#Use of quotation mark for glottal stops, etc. and we were at the point of deciding between modifying the statement drastically or simply removing it. I have replaced it with a modified statement. But I don't mind if people decide to remove it altogether. The current statement is not being followed for good reason and should not remain. Presumably at the time it was written the recommendation made good sense. There would still have been browsers in common use that did not support HTML entities. But any such browsers still in use which are unable to interpret HTML entities for right single quotation mark and left single quotation mark will also be unable to display properly – and — which are much used throughout Wikipedia, in articles, on many system pages, on the main page, and in featured articles. Wikipedia has long passed the point of restricting editors and users to Latin-1 characters. The only reason to disallow curly quotation marks is the necessity of entering them as HTML entities, a difficulty that should disappear whenever the English Wikipedia moves to Unicode. Until then, replacing all quotation characters with the proper HTML entities and asking users to type the proper HTML entities is far too much to ask. So consistancy still demands we keep using straight quotation marks and apostrophes. But since some articles do use these HTML entities for special uses outside of their normal English usage, there probably should be a statement explicilty allowing this. They are especially used in spelling Hawaiian forms with ‘okina and sometimes in transliterations from Semitic languages.

As to User:FoeNyx's exotic quotation marks, ( « ) and ( » ) are included in the basic Latin-1 character set and have never been a problem to display in Wikipedia. The symbol ( „ ) is included in almost every Latin-character Postscript and Truetype font and is also normally displayable on all browsers in common use if the proper HMTL entity is provided. These characters should be used if they occur in any non-English text included in an article. There is no need to warn against use of the Zapf Dingbat quotation ornaments ( ❛ ), ( ❜ ), ( ❝ ), and ( ❞ ) or any of the Zapf Dingbat symbols in text because they are not intended for simple text use. As to the Chinese quotation marks ( 〝 ) and ( 〟 ), Chinese characters are widely used in Wikipedia now (see for example Chinese_language). Use of Chinese characters and other characters not found in standard fonts is something to be hammered out on a case-by-case basis by those working with languages or disciplines that use them. If you have Chinese fonts on your machine and are using almost any browser other than IE, you will have no trouble displaying these characters in Wikipedia. This information was also removed by jguk in his current proposed style trim, presumably for somewhat the same reasons I have done so.

Jallan 06:20, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)