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November 2016

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a message letting you know that one or more of your recent edits to ASMO 449 has been undone by an automated computer program called ClueBot NG.

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Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 19:08, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

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Thank you. ClueBot NG (talk) 19:09, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Quotation marks keyboard layouts

Hi, I don’t understand, why you undid my revision regarding the NEO-keyboard. Pressing shift is 2nd level access, is it not? Didn’t I get the memo? »«„“” are produced by pressing shift in conjunction with 4, 5, 8, 9, and 0. -- K (T | C) 08:46, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

Reverting Quotation Marks

You reverted my changes to Quotation mark and cited as your reason "undoing anglocentric POV".

However the previous wording was no less "anglocentric" than mine, so you didn't "undo" any anglocentrism. The reversion has made the page harder to understand.

Please read the talk page for more details.

I made significant effort to avoid any linguistic bias, being very careful to distinguish the direction of curvature from whether they're used in opening or closing position, so it is naturally disappointing to me that you have found cause to accuse me of such.

A consistent description of the shapes of quote marks is going to have to pick one way or the other to describe the direction in which they curve; that's not anglocentrism, that's just geometry. Whichever way we pick, it's going to be "unnatural" for half of the world's languages. For want of a better option, I simply kept "left", "right", "inward" and "outward" with the same sense as they were already used throughout the article.

(This is what makes the accusation of anglocentrism particularly galling; by keeping the use of "left" and "right" unchanged, I was forced to describe curves using the word for the opposite direction from how I would naturally describe them in English.)

Yes I noted which orientation is "normal" for English, but I don't believe was unreasonable for a Wiki page written in English for people reading English. If you objected to that, you could have simply removed that one sentence, and not reverted the entire change.

Please explain in detail how you think I could have made the page less anglocentric, and how, if at all, I may inadvertently have added anglocentrism to it.

If no such explanation is forthcoming, I shall assume that your reversion was in error, and undo it.

Martin Kealey (talk) 22:09, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

follow-up

Thank-you for your reply.

The added section wasn't intended to define or illustrate the use of any particular glyphs; rather, it was intended to define the terms that would subsequently be used to describe their usage in the rest of the page. Could I have made that clearer?

As well as deleting my added section, you also reverted the alignment of descriptions used in the rest of the document, which had been a complete mess. That was especially unhelpful.

Thinking that the quotation marks are convex is an English language user point of view. You are viewing the quotation marks as if they were a pair of parenthesis and, therefore, you are viewing them as convex. An user from some other language (German, for instance) may view them as concave.

That conclusion about my thinking is erroneous.

You are quite right that the article is about quotation marks in any/all languages, and I was always mindful of that. However it's written in English for an English-speaking audience, and foremost for native English speakers who are fluent in no other language.

I was defining terms to describe the glyphs individually, not as pairs. "Left" or "right" refers to that part of the outline of an individual glyph, not to the position of the glyph in relation to any quoted text. (For example, the glyph “ is "leftward convex" (its left side having no concavity) regardless of its use as an opening or closing quote mark.)

I created the section precisely because I suspected that these terms would not necessarily be obvious to the reader when used in the subsequent text.

"Convex" was not my preferred term, but rather was established by discussion on the talk page. The terms were chosen to (try to) make sense to an English reader. We could have used either "convex" or "concave"; the decision was based on keeping the existing "left" and "right" as used in the text, not because I had a mental model of "convex brackets".

I agree with you that "concave" and "convex" make more sense for pairs of quote marks, but only in some languages. They would fail to describe the usage in languages that use the same glyph before and after (”like this”). They also would be unhelpful in describing the glyphs used as repeated continuation marks. But on the whole I think your argument is more reasonable that some of those who promoted "convex" as being "obvious". Clearly our intended meaning of "convex" wasn't obvious to you, any more than "leftward curving" was obvious to some of them.

One argument against describing pairs of quotes as "concave" or "convex" was this example:

Introduction before a quote »a quoted passage runs over a line break,
and ending here« with some more unquoted text following it.

where the flowing of text between margins results in opening and closing quote marks not being respectively left and right of each other.

I specifically wrote that individual glyphs could be placed before or after the text depending on the conventions of the language concerned, so it concerns me greatly that this was seemingly overlooked in your assessment.

With that out of the way, I believe your remaining objections would have been better addressed by making your own changes rather than reverting mine.

Some characters (❝, ❞, ❛, ❜) are not used to quote text,

[...]

You forgot the opening quotation marks („)

This misses the point of the section: I was using the glyphs to illustrate the terms, not the other way round. Whether a Unicode code-point is used as a quote mark in ordinary text is only marginally relevant; I included ❝ because its enlarged shape better illustrates "leftward convexity".

The symbols „ and ” differ only in position rather than shape (which is to say, they have the same glyph), so that was not important for defining "convex rightward", but I would have no objection to you adding it as another illustrative example.

“Straight quotes” (ASCII quotes) never appear at the baseline

I didn't intend to imply that _all_ glyphs could appear on the baseline. This seemed so obvious that I didn't feel the need to state it.

The straight quotes ' and " are not the only exclusions - the ‘ and “ glyphs don't appear on the baseline either.

Feel free to add an explanation if you think it's not obvious.

angled quotes do not appear “in between”, they are always aligned with the lower case characters.

The vagueness of "in between" was somewhat intentional as when I wrote it I wasn't quite certain about the universality of the placement rules. However I agree that my wording was not helpful in defining any term, so should have been omitted.

I've learned since that angled quotes either align on the mid-line of the lower-case letters (»‹«› in some European languages) or fill between the baseline and the ascender limit (《》 in some Asian languages).

[...] vertical scripts [...]

You would be welcome to add definitions for suitable terms, but they were not my immediate concern in fixing with the terrible ambiguity in the existing descriptions of horizontal scripts.

Overall my text was not perfect, but the previous text was worse, so I would have preferred that my text be carried through and improved - or even sections excised - rather than the whole being reverted.

If you have suggestions for better terms than "leftward convex" and "rightward convex", please engage with the discussion on the talk page.

Martin Kealey (talk) 03:35, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

postscript

I have found this entire episode to be demoralizing and personally stressful.

I put considerable effort into crafting that new section, and to have it and all the other changes summarily removed was quite distressing.

Reverting is a heavy-handed approach that should not be taken lightly.

Doing do on the basis of flawed assumptions about the original writer is discourteous.

Reverting without profering a detailed explanation on the talk page is simply lazy, especially compared to the effort that went into creating the changes in the first place.

I'm now in limbo. I can't simply re-revert the page, because other people have made changes since, but the page still needs a lot of improvement.

However I am hesitant to make substantial changes lest someone come along and revert it again. With that in the back of my mind, making minor changes seems pointless.

I really wish that Wikipedia was more like git, where multiple changes to a file can be done, merged, undone, and re-done, mostly automatically, and with guidance when manual intervention is needed.

For fear of offending someone and triggering an edit war, I've now spent longer on this discussion than I did in my original edits; this has left me tired and drained, and I just don't want to be bothered any more.

That is why reverting should be a last resort.

Martin Kealey (talk) 04:38, 24 April 2021 (UTC)