User:Noetica/ActionMOSVP/Archive1

Let's try to keep the above table clear; feel free to bend my initial advantages/disadvantages slightly, by definition, the (dis)advantages I listed are subjective.

I'll clarify the meaning of some of my terms:

Intuitive

The characters somehow 'look' or 'feel' like a space.

Intrusive

Since they represent a space, I feel that the characters should not be too 'big' in the source text and attract too much attention. Additionally, a single character is better than multiple characters.

Easy to type

It would be nicest if we can use a single character found on the keyboard, or two identical ones; alternatively, e.g. `~ uses a single key twice, unshifted and shifted.

Used in wiki syntax

Some characters, such as _ and ~, are already used in MediaWiki syntax; others, like `, are used in other wiki syntax. This could cause problems.

Phaunt (talk) 11:20, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

• Pity they're not numbered for easy reference. [Fixed now.–N] I like Noetica's first and second suggestions, and Dank's. Tony (talk) 12:30, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

• Nice start, that table! Just one thing: can we either align to the top in each cell, or have a line between rows? Perhaps we should number them also, yes. [Fixed now.–N]– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 12:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
• I don't like my earlier suggestions now, but have added /\ to the mix. No shift, just two standard qwerty keystrokes, looks intuitively like a space – I think!– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 12:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I've added 'somewhat'; IMO, it's not as easy as a single or two identical characters, and I still find `~ easier to type too. But it's a nice suggestion, and I don't think it's too intrusive.

As to the table layout, I'm not exactly a table wizard, so feel free to improve it (alignment etc) and add numbering in the bargain. Phaunt (talk) 12:48, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes Phaunt: perhaps `~ isn't really too bad after all. Let's assemble a few of these, and see what others think of the whole lot.

I'm no table expert, either! I think SMcCandlish may be able to help with this when he drops in. He's a high-level markup expert.– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 13:03, 12 December 2007 UTC)

Hm, just consulted Help:Table; a simple 'class="wikitable"' does wonders. I also added numbers. Now I really should return to my work. Catch you later ;-) Phaunt (talk) 13:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

We welcome user Peter Blaise to the group. Peter, I've put your contribution in a new section, below. Note that we have a specific agenda here. A critique of that agenda is fine, of course: but let's have it conducted a little to side, please.–N

Help for Tables fried my brain when I ventured there in great need. Tony (talk) 13:15, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Nice work, Phaunt. The table is fine now.

• Any markup which seems "ad hoc" could be used, snarkily, to dismiss Wikipedia as "not suitable for X purpose", for instance, "Wikipedia went their own way and uses a markup language no one else uses...it works for them, but the average user is never going to know that you can't type /\ because that's a hard space." And if this is something that doesn't bother you, it still might bother TPTB. I understand, and yield, if this is an opinion shared by one :) So, to summarize:

• &; or &X; (your choice of X) is as close to "not ad hoc" as we can get, that's the accepted way to insert special characters in any flavor of HTML, and currently existing articles written by people with even basic knowledge of HTML probably don't already have a lot of &-followed-by-; that we would have to go back and edit out.
• If we all decide next week that we also want to promote appropriate use of hard hyphens, en-dashes or whatever, the &X; idea is easily extensible; the other proposals don't seem to be, to me.
• Whatever we propose will only be accepted if it's significantly faster and/or easier to remember than  . I could be wrong, but my feeling is that the ` key is one of the keys the typical touch-typist is most likely to have to hunt for.
• "Nothing" between & and ; seems a reasonable mnemonic for "space", but I'm not wedded to that.

— Dan Dank55 (talk) 15:21, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

• • Note, however, that MediaWiki already uses a markup language that deviates from HTML. Using tilde for a hard space (borrowed from TeX, i.e. not ad-hoc) would IMO be an intuitive option. I use it so often, along with backquotes, that I, for one, don't have to hunt for it but can touch-type it. Anyway, I feel that an important property of whatever we choose should be that it doesn't detract from the text flow when editing an article, as   does; that's what I mean by intrusiveness above. Intuitiveness, having a 'space-like' look & feel, is also high on my list, but YMMV. Phaunt (talk) 15:40, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with all of Phaunt's points, word for word, and if you can get the community to go back and take ~ out of any current article...including any earlier edit that might come back in by reverting...where it occurs with a non-space on either side, and you can get some kind of critical mass of editors to use ~ correctly for this new purpose, then I support it completely. (That is, the majority of contributors will not expect "My directory is /users/foo~bar" to give them a hard space, but enough diligent editors willing to make corrections could solve the problem.) "MediaWiki deviates from HTML" is true, but usually it varies by introducing strings that appear to almost everyone as markup. Because Phaunt's points are so good, I would also support some slight variant...so I now see the point of `~, etc, and it wouldn't upset me if we adopt that (although, again, I'm worried about what we do for an encore if we want to make other things like hard hyphens easier for the same reasons that we want to make hard spaces easier...&n; &m; &h; would be nicely parallel for en-dash, em-dash and hard hyphen). I defer to your opinion on what will keep the learning curve smallest. Oh, and an apology, you're quite right, TeX/LaTeX is every bit as "non-ad-hoc" as &; — Dan Dank55 (talk) 17:22, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Btw, hyphens aren't the current agenda item, but I am nevertheless putting this note here rather than below because it's relevant to our choice for hard spaces. Our consensus was that typographic convention...I think even by "serious" bloggers, much less encyclopedists...requires sq[hardspace]ft, and that now is the right time to make that happen more often on Wikipedia. Well, they are equally unlikely to wrap where a hard hyphen is needed (and en-dashes and em-dashes would be nice too). Hyphens don't need to be on the table today, but I don't think it's inappropriate to discuss how today's solution is going to apply to tomorrow's problems. — Dan Dank55 (talk) 19:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

The {{nbsp}} type of solution would work there as well, though I'm not sure what the best name for the template would be. I'd favor {{nbhy}} for symmetry, but some might object that nbhy is not the character entity name for the non-breaking hyphen. (Embrassingly I can't actually remember what it is!) The great thing about doing this with templates is that templates can have as many redir names as anyone wants, so whether this name or that is intuitive to me or your or the next person is pretty much irrelevant. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• One last thing. If TPTB can read a new template to mean "anywhere in this page, replace (letter)~(letter) by (letter)[hardspace](letter)", then my objections to ~ vanish. I would think a template for just ~ would be overkill, but maybe you have other tools you want to throw into the mix as a gift to the editors who care about these things. — Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:49, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• Cannot support any form of made-up &SOMETHING;. Wikipedia content is repurposed in multiple ways, and including bogus character entities will cause problem for re-use of content. It isn't going to be any easier for an HTML noob to learn, and for those that already know HTML, it doesn't do anything useful, since they'll continue to use the nbsp one. I think we should call for __, ~~ or `` (assuming one of them is not already reserved for some other purpose), to the extent that we need to "go there" at all. I don't see any problem sticking with  , and simply asking for a "non-breaking space" clickable widget to be added to the stuff below the edit window. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:14, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• Update: My personal feeling on this is that the existence of {{nbsp}} {{s}} should simply moot this part of the discussion; we already have what is needed without requiring any code changes to implement it, and instead should focus on getting the developers to add an option to the edit box character shortcuts. While it would perhaps be nice if something like ~~ or `` worked, the odds of these causing problems we haven't thought of yet is actually quite high. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:37, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• My apologies if we've already reached the end of this discussion and I haven't figured that out yet :) As discussed at WP:Math, "Mediawiki uses a subset of TeX markup". What are the odds of allowing a page to have a template at the top named something like "MoreTeX" (there's already one for "TeX", it just formats that word) which would cause that page to process a few more symbols...~ for hard space leaps to mind...in the way that TeX does? This would make TeX'ies happy. — Dan Dank55 (talk) 21:50, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• SMcCandlish makes valuable points. (And thanks for the "refactoring", S.) There are likely to be unforeseen problems with any of the options so far set out. Some more than others. That's why long discussion is necessary.
• I'm interested in the {{...}} type of markup. This sort of thing could be implemented right now, yes?
• I think {{nbsp}} is too long: to type, and to scan in reading. Effectively, a non-breaking space is a hard space, right? (For all practical purposes, I mean.) Unfortunately {{hs}} is taken: it yields "♥"! So is {{s}} taken. Why not just {{ }}? Intuitive!
• Speaking of interims and long terms, I agree with Dan that we need to keep an eye on future needs also. But in my opinion and experience, markup for hard hyphen is never going to be as salient an issue as for hard space. Nonetheless, consider {{ }}: and grab {{hy}}, also. ({{h}} is taken, and yields "ḥ"; {{hh}} is also taken, and yields a certain banner.) We have a strong case for these, and could run with them both right now.
• Doing that would not stop discussion and the effort for change. This is a big issue: of itself, and in its consequences for the whole question of Wikipedia markup and editing practice.

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 21:41, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• {{s}} does exist; it is a variant of {{nbsp}}/{{spaces}} (in fact, I would say they should probably be merged). I think this would be perfect. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 23:17, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

• Yes SMcCandlish, I say it exists, above. (I quickly corrected myself on that point.)
• Have you tried it out? I can't get it to work at all in the way we would want: as a single-effect inline markup. I must be missing something in the obscure documentation. It would be great if it did work, of course.

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 23:44, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Just a short note: it shouldn't be a problem of itself that a template is currently already taken for some other purpose, if it can be argued that its shortness is of prime importance to our purposes. The same was true for {{w}}, which was taken for some Japanese pop duo; I moved that template to {{Project W}} and hijacked {{w}} to redirect to {{welcome}} instead. Phaunt (talk) 09:50, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree, Phaunt. Here at WP a prior claim is not necessarily a stronger claim. It's just a matter of degree of difficulty, if we have to argue for release of something already allocated. Let's be realistic; but also let's be bold.

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 10:35, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I misunderstood {{s}}'s workings; it appears to be an outright copy of {{space}} and even has word-for-word identical documentation, though I'd need to do a diff (in the non-WP sense) to be sure the code is actually identical. Usurping Template:S shouldn't be that hard to do; if it's really needed it could be moved to Template:S0 or something (there are already Template:S1, etc.). All that the proposed new template really needs to do is output   by default, and allow for a numeric parameter that allows more than one of them in a row. One line of code. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 09:29, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

An optional parameter for more than one   in a row, interesting; what would multiple hard spaces be used for? Surely not for layout purposes... (I don't mean this ironically; I'm genuinely interested.) Phaunt (talk) 23:22, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

If we can be confident of acquiring {{s}}, it is a serious contender. In fact though, I would favour a capital "S", {{S}}: apply the shift key just once, and then tap five times: two adjacent keys twice; the other right near a shift key. Not too hard to learn, really.

But it seems that we then face a decision:

Path 1. Push for this expedient solution, and leave it at that. Simply spread the word far and wide that this is the preferred markup.

[An easy way forward, but not optimal.]

Path 2. Push for this expedient solution, then also push for a two-character markup.

[Makes the total task longer and more complex; and the interim fix makes the two-character solution harder to support. But we get quick gratification.]

Path 3. Ignore the expedient solution as an interesting distraction, and continue work on an optimal two-character solution.

[Hard work ahead, but we expected that; keeps us focused on a genuine and valuable reform. We could still keep {{S}} under wraps as a fall-back.]

I haven't yet developed an opinion on this three-way choice. What do others think?

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 08:53, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I've read enough of other MOS discussions to know that the 7 people here will make a wise and practical choice, so I won't enter a vote. I just wanted to make sure that all the relevant issues were brought up. — Dan Dank55 (talk) 14:40, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Don't see this as a vote; just an inventarisation of peoples' opinions. Please voice yours, if you have one, or make a different proposal. Phaunt (talk) 23:22, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

So do I understand correctly that the S thing works already? If that's the case, Path 2 seems the best, yes? Tony (talk) 15:22, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

{{S}} doesn't work yet, but would be very easy to implement, especially when compared to changing the wiki markup. Implementing it means that there are four ways of achieving hard spaces: using {{nowrap}},  , {{nbsp}} and {{S}} (fourfive if you also count the Unicode character). Since each of them has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, this is fine by me.

I also agree it would still be optimal if provisions for the hard space were included in wikitext as well. Therefore, I agree with pursuing path 2. Phaunt (talk) 23:22, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Moving forward

I suggest that we:

1. make one push and dispense with the idea of an interim and then a final solution; and
2. draw from the rather bloated table above a more digestible short-list of options.

I put forward a short-list of four possibilities for your consideration.

Two html wikitext mark-ups, which will require the assistance of a developer (there's a suggestion that the next step be to sound out User:Tim Starling, who's a P/T paid Wikimedia developer), and that if/when developed, the WikiMedia approval process will need to be negotiated.

• Number 3: `` (This is nice and easy to input.)
• Number 4: `~ (I find the coordination of thumb and finger, or of both hands, clumsy.)

Two templates, which SMcCandlish may be able to organise for us.

• Number 11: {{ }} (Intuitive, but five keystrokes. May turn out not to work well technically, but we don't know yet.)
• Number 12: {{S}} (Already exists, although five keystrokes not ideal. SMcCandlish would need to negotiate the taking over of this template from a WPian who has already "claimed" it.) Tony (talk) 14:07, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

replaced "html" with "wikitext" Phaunt (talk) 21:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

PLEASE COMMENT

• My feeling is that we should try first for Number 3 by contacting Tim Starling. If that doesn't work, we should ask SMcCandlish to explore 11 and 12. Tony (talk) 14:07, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree with your proposal. Note that 11 probably requires developer action too. (I might also be able to help with that, I've contributed a bit to MediaWiki in the past.) Phaunt (talk) 22:02, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

So effectively Tony now puts forward a composite of the three paths I outlined above, and calls for preferences from a shortened list of options. Here are my preferences, from most to least preferred:

• Number 3: `` [Simple to type and read, intuitive; the fact that some wiki markup somewhere uses it may not matter, but needs further study. Is it used in Wikipedia itself?]
• Number 4: `~ [Unlike Tony I find this easy to type, compared to all options except ``.]
• Number 11: {{ }} [SMcCandlish has said this may be hard to implement; it may be worth pressing for, though. It seems very intuitive and memorable to me, and can be typed with the shift key depressed throughout. Symmetry, closeness of { and } keys, unmatched handiness of the spacebar: these work strongly in its favour.]
• Number 12: {{S}} [Seems easiest to achieve. Slightly harder to type than {{ }}, but not by much; slightly less intuitive to remember and to scan in source text.]

Could we have other opinions soon, please? Does anyone want to select another option from the table for shortlisting, or add something completely new? When we have answers to that, I can draw up a small table for votes, extensible but based on opinions so far. When that's done I or some other delegate can approach Tim Starling for his input.

–N– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 01:08, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello. I know this will probably be shot down, but I have had the idea of using commas. As with apostrophes, they are not supposed to be used in pairs or larger groups, so this can be, in my opinion, an acceptable choice of markup. They are typed extremely easily, are not intrusive, are not used in existing syntax (in my knowledge), and can even be considered to be somewhat intuitive (they only take up the lower part of a line, reminding of an underscore).

We could use three commas instead of two in order to avoid typos—the reasoning for this would be that, due to the high usage of the comma key, such typos might occur more often than, say, erroneous double apostrophes. However, I find this unnecessary; a full search of Wikipedia for double commas has just yielded nothing but the absolute zero.

You are free to laugh at my idea, so that I can then laugh at yours. Your effort is, in any case, laudable, and I am glad to be a part of it. Waltham, The Duke of 19:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

No no, your Grace. Welcome to the conversation. I was just now on the point of pressing things forward, because there was so little activity. I now favour delaying things while we look at what you have added, and getting decisive soon after that. (–N)

Myself, I like your suggestion very much. As far as I can see, the only objection is that it is radical. There is a real problem of conservatism to overcome. I don't think it's a problem that ",," or ",,," might sometimes be, or be taken to be, a simple error for ",". What's the worst consequence of making that error, and wrongly having a hard space appear or disappear? And surely an editor's normal checking will reveal which is intended. For example, p.,,57 can only mean p.,57, not p. 57. There is strong precedent. We all accept '' and '''; we all live with the occasional error and inconvenience with those.

I like it, preferably as ",,". Other comments?

– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 22:14, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Revised shortlist, and a vote soon

Let's get moving on this. I call for quick summary discussion of the shortlist we've drawn up from the full table of options we started with; below that table is the key, and below that the full discussion.

THE SHORTLIST:

• Number 3: ``
• Number 4: `~
• Number 14: ,, or ,,,
• Number 11: {{ }}
• Number 12: {{S}}

On the basis of your feedback, I'll soon set up a voting table. (–N– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 23:16, 29 December 2007 (UTC))

New discussion here, please:

• Happy with shortlist. I like 3, 14 and 12 (all short and distinctive); I don't like 4 (fiddly) and 11 (weird, although I could be swayed on that). Tony (talk) 00:06, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• I mostly support Options Number 12 and—guess—Number 14 (with a preference towards 14, and more specifically the double-comma solution). I would not object to Number 3 if preferred by others. Waltham, The Duke of 01:07, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
• Thanks for the heads-up, Noetica, and btw guys, this discussion was a lot of fun. I don't really have a preference but I'd like to bring up two new points in favor of 11 (including {{}}, no space) and 12: I feel markup should always look like markup, to any user (I can easily see someone thinking that `` or ,, was a typo, not markup), and {{}} is actually only two keystrokes when I'm editing in WP...for the simple reason that I have to use {{ all over the place but never {, so I've alias'd { to {{, maybe others do the same. — Dan Dank55 (talk) 01:59, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: If it were not so deeply-seated in editors' Wiki-brain-code, '' might also be mistaken for a typographic error. I should say that it is a matter of perception and habit more than anything else. Waltham, The Duke of 11:31, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

• We could simplify our options if we ask someone upstairs who knows: will they ever accept markup which doesn't look like obvious markup to someone who hasn't read WP:MOS? If not, are they going to be willing to put our proposed markup for hard spaces in the first lesson, alongside italics and bolding? After we get that answer, we settle the issue by asking a variety of new-ish people whether they would make the connection that `` was markup. I don't mind speculating that {{}}, {{ }} and {{S}} will at least look like markup to everyone, even if they don't know what they mean. I see Tony's objection below that too many keystrokes are a killer for him, but I note again that I don't use single {'s often in editing so, with keyboard aliasing, {{}} is two easy keystrokes for me. Dank55 (talk) 16:05, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

• I am not sure that I am happy with any of the shortlisted suggestions, which I think will be confusing for editors; I feel that the need for a non-breaking space can generally be handled by {{nowrap|}} template - it does not intrude into the text and does exactly what it says on the tin. In the relatively rare cases where that is not appropriate, then resort to the  . Gaius Cornelius (talk) 11:27, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

• Comment—no way I'm bothering to type in all of those keys to activate the nowrap template. I want something quick and dirty. SO many hard spaces are required, frankly, to display text properly in an online window. Tony (talk) 13:15, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

• No. 12. BTW, I can tell you right now that No. 11 is simply not going to happen; the MediaWiki software just doesn't work like that, and changing it (I can say from software coding experience) is almost certainly non-trivial coding-wise, and would have widespread fallout. Spacing is optional between all MediaWiki path elements - Template:Fact and w: en: Template: Fact are the same thing; the space is simply not interpreted as a character when it comes after a colon. Thus [[Template: ]] (or {{ }} if you prefer) is simply [[Template:]], a null page name which generates an error (and not right here that you can't even link to it, so not only is it not a valid page name, the wikimarkup parser doesn't even recognize it). The fallout I speak of is that any use of [[Template: SOMETHING]] would suddenly be a redlink, including all cases of {{subst: SOMETHING}}. This won't be acceptable to the developers or the community, because it will literally take hundreds of hours (if not more) of clean up with AWB or bot, and people will simply create more of them by accident anyway. Also, all of the solutions proposed other than #12 require convincing the developers to do something, which historically has been rather difficult. All that said, I really don't care, since I'll continue to use  . — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 18:06, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

PS: I don't understand why this discussion is happening in userspace anyway; should be at WT:MOS or WP:VPT. This being effectively a private discussion is not going to engender much empathy with whatever its ultimate output is. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 18:16, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Works for me and thanks for the explanation, {{S}} now gets my vote too. Dank55 (talk) 20:59, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Very well, all. Some of this discussion is off-topic, and I might address it in the collapsible section Discussion that is not on the current agenda item.

There is only one criticism of the shortlist that requires action – SMcCandlish's observations concerning {{ }}. Since it is unlikely to win support for those good reasons, it now dropped.

In the new section immediately below I call for a formal vote. Focussed current discusion should, I think, continue at this point rather than in the voting section.

–N– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 03:33, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[Continuing discussion on the vote (see next section) HERE:]

• Has any thought been given to borrowing one of the TeX notations "\ " (text space), "\;" (large space), and "\," (small space). I realise "\ " might be too ambiguous outside a TeX context, but "\," might be alright. It "\," would work well, as in most cases discussed, a small space might even look better than a normal sized one, such as after a dot, or between digits as a thousands separator. For example <math>p.\,23</math> renders as . This symbol is reasonably intuitive, unobtrusive, easy to type and not ad-hoc. . −Woodstone (talk) 10:30, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

  Note that, to the best of my knowledge, the TeX spaces you propose *do* allow a line to be broken at that position; this may hamper intuitiveness even for those who know TeX. The TeX markup for a hard space is the tilde (~), which was the reason behind one of my proposals. Phaunt (talk) 14:41, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

  Trying it out, by adjusting window size, on the rendered example above, it does not seem to allow breaking. Trying a longer one here . It definitely does not break in my browser (IE7). −Woodstone (talk) 15:11, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

  Neither does it in mine (thank you for giving that example); however, I believe that at least in my setup, this is because MediaWiki renders it as an image. I would have to try it out in LaTeX and generate a PDF, then see what happens. I don't have the time for that at this moment, but I still believe line breaks are allowed. Phaunt (talk) 15:40, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to the page, Woodstone. Various similar options have been discussed, with various motivations. Right now we have to move things along if we are ever to get a consensus solution. I hope you will vote for your preferences among the shortlisted options. A strong turnout will help!

–N– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 17:03, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

I decline to vote for any of the options shown at this time. I want to use the Unicode hard space, and provide advice to users of the common operating systems and browsers about how to create a keyboard macro to enter that character; a keyboard macro that would work outside Wikipedia too. Then, I would want the Wikipedia text editor to display hard spaces distinctively, and provide an easy, well-identified click box to enter a hard space. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 15:15, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that this would be very nice; come to think of it, I would also prefer this over any of the other options. I think I have toyed with this idea in my mind but never made it explicit here, or even to myself. Do you have any idea whether this would be easy or hard to achieve (the text editor part)?. Would you differentiate between the unicode hard space and  , or would you support transforming all occurrences of the latter into the unicode hard space? Phaunt (talk) 15:37, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to the page, Gerry. Your involvement is valuable.

The current vote is on a very specific proposal: which markup alternative should be promoted to the wider Wikipedia community, from a shortlist established earlier by discussion. I have thought about your change to allow a no change vote. As secretary and facilitator for this group (self-appointed as a volunteer, with no one dissenting when given the opportunity), I now remove that option from the table. There will be ample opportunity to push alternative proposals later: here and in much wider forums we'll be moving to. I look forward to vigorous debate then and there!

By all means continue discussion at the off-topic location in this page.

I certainly hope you will stick around, and also reconsider and vote among the available alternatives in the current shortlist, even if you later argue for your quite different solution.

–N– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 17:03, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

In view of your refusal to accept a "none of the above" vote, and the difficulty of understanding and contribute to this page, I permanently oppose this process and whatever comes out of it. Do to the confusing structure of this page, I now withdraw from the discussion. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:11, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Gerry. This branch-discussion page is bold, unique, and experimental. Every effort is made to keep things transparent and accessible for all editors. This is, of course, virtually impossible for MOS-type discussions – no matter where and how they have been conducted.

The structure of the present poll (probably the first of several, each with consensus concerning options discussed beforehand) must be kept constant if it is to have any hope of legitimacy.

Dissent is inevitable, expected, and noted.

–N

I favor Gerry's proposal to help users with keyboard aliasing, and I'm sorry I didn't bring it up myself. That has changed my mind on which solution I favor...it isn't in the current table, and I understand that now is not the time to talk about it, I'll wait until this discussion moves back into WP:MOS_Talk or WP:VPT to discuss it, and I'll abstain for the moment. I want to make it clear that I support what has gone on here, because I think the discussion has been intelligent and there has been very good reason to keep it here, at least until now. Endless discussions of the benefits of one markup character over another are best left to people who care. If everything we've said had shown up in WP:MOS_Talk, then we would have bored people to tears and generated hostility towards achieving any progress at all. So, good job guys, and I'll see you in WP:MOS_Talk or wherever. — Dan Dank55 (talk) 17:47, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Dan. Understood and appreciated!

–N

Ah, I missed something important from WP:MOS_Talk: Noetica>We are working out a proposal for markup that will be replaced by &nbsp; It may be I'm misunderstanding, but I think that's the same thing I suggest on my talk page, that it's fine with me to use whatever for markup, as long as we either remap it on our own keyboard, or run a bot to replace it later after we've typed it, or have some bot do that for us later. With this proviso, I can easily support what seems to be the current top vote-getter, ",," or ",,,". I suggested the nowrap template, and I'll argue for that later, but I could live with &nbsp; - Dan Dank55 (talk) 04:02, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

If we would go for the insert button and a distinctive symbol in the editor, we might have a look at:

• p.⌴23, (decimal 9012) which is the classical square bottomed u symbol, but does not render well by default in IE
• p.‸23, (decimal 8242) which has an intuitive appeal, and renders ok in both firefox and IE

−Woodstone (talk) 21:04, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, Woodstone. An interesting problem about how to do this with an insert button, if that were needed. It will surely come up again in broader discussion. Please note that this is the place for a more specific discussion, on a different proposal: the current shortlist options for markup, and the current vote. :)

–N– Noetica^♬♩ Talk 21:15, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[Woodstone, I hope you don't mind: I moved your point about still another alternative to #Discussion that is not on the current agenda item. People, please look and discuss there too!–N] [Ended.]