Topic on User talk:GentlemensDame883

In some cases, like pluralizing links, it's completely unnecessary. For example: [[Trope]]s is a perfectly valid and legal construction (and we recommend it in several help pages), and produces a link like this: Tropes. Putting a spurious <nowiki/> between the link and the "s" does absolutely nothing but make you type more and require an admin to edit the page to remove it.

Similarly, don't use the nowiki markup to "escape" an apostrophe when you want to keep it from inadvertently causing a boldface markup. We have a template, {{'}}, which does that in fewer characters: ''[[Titanic]]''{{'}}s script, which produces: Titanic‍'‍s script.

We strongly request that you stop using the nowiki markup.

-- Looney Toons, admin

CC: @GentlemensDame883, @Labster, @Robkelk, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative, @SelfCloak, @GethN7

I just noticed that we didn't actually say this anywhere in the Style Guide, so this isn't something that we would penalize you for doing up until now.

I've just added this to the Style Guide, under "Italics, Boldface, and Other Emphasis", so... now it's part of the wiki's guidelines. It is faster to use the template, after all - it's four keystrokes instead of nine.

-- robkelk, admin

Five, but who's counting but obsessive-compulsives like me? <grin> Thanks for doing that, Rob.

Well, I wasn't counting the apostrophe itself... so five keystrokes instead of ten. 😀

Sorry, I don't understand what's going on. I do most of my editing in visual mode and had no idea that whatever this is was going on underneath the hood. It's definitely not something that I'm going to all the trouble to type out manually.

Ah, that's different. We'd already noticed that the visual editor does some pretty stupid stuff to the underlying page source; we didn't know this was one of things it was doing. <sigh>

That said, thank you for pointing this out to me. I will strive to avoid repeating this mistake in future.