Wikipedia talk:Hyphens and dashes

Pointless

This should simply be redirected to MOS:DASH. Actually, I'd call it WP:POINTy, rather than pointless. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 02:32, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps the initial point of this (the view of its creator):

• Hyphens can be used for all of the above, and replacement with a more precise form can be annoying.

This has been corrected to the consensus view:

• Hyphens can be used for initial entry of any of the above, and replacement with a more precise form may be done by other subsequent editors. Disrupting Wikipedia to constantly complain about the consensus for the more precise forms can be annoying.

– Wbm1058 (talk) 13:21, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

After that and other changes, this is now a pretty simple how-to essay, so I don't have any objection to it. I was thinking of WP:TFDing it, but it actually serves a purpose now. I still think it could be safely merged into MOS, but I wouldn't say it necessarily needs to any longer.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:53, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

En Dash for phrase? I don't think so

I was reading and correcting grammar (ironically) in this article when I saw this phrase in the text explaining acceptable uses for the En Dash: "or to separate a phrase – in a sentence". That's patently false, and a poor example to boot. Em dashes are used for separating phrases (or parenthetical clauses) in sentences, as it states directly after that in the Em Dash section and in the Manual of Style. Em dashes are used to separate phrases—like this—in a sentence. My gut reaction was to remove it, but as I haven't been involved in any discussions on this page or anything, I thought I should write it on the Talk page first. —sdream93 (talk) 05:26, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually, spaced en dashes are used for the same purpose, many editors prefer them for readability, and MOS permits both styles:

• Unspaced em dashes may be used to separate phrases—like this—in a sentence. This style is common in fiction and journalism.
• Spaced en dashes (technically nonbreaking-space, en dash, space) may also be used to separate phrases – like this – in a sentence. This style is common in technical writing; because encyclopedic writing is closer to technical writing than journalism or fiction, this style is common and increasingly so on Wikipedia, if not outright preferred.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:53, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

History of dash controversies on Wikipedia

This essay was started in December 2012, as a fork of comments I put on my user page in December 2011. Little did I, who had spent a career using ASCII, and just blissfully discovering these new characters made possible by Unicode, realize that seven months earlier these wonderful dashes had been placed under Arbitration Committee sanctions – though I suppose I realized then that there was some controversy surrounding their use here. I just learned the details when I edited Talk:Cartilage–hair hypoplasia for another reason.

• Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard/Archive 7 § Arbitration motion regarding hyphens and dashes led to
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/dash drafting and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/dash drafting/discussion led to
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 123 § Dash guidelines: toward a conclusion led to
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 124 § Dashes: a new draft led to a
• 24 July 2011 "dash policy update" – actually one in a series of many updates – Wbm1058 (talk) 00:36, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

There are so many parts of this 2011 dash fest that are amusing in retrospect. One of the big stumbling blocks was User:Pmanderson, who eventually got blocked for disrupting the implementation of the consensus, and later got blocked indefinitely for using a sockpuppet to further disrupt discussions of MOS issues; he eventually got unblocked, but has stopped editing, which I think is a big part of the reason why things settled down there. Another amusing bit was when User:Born2cycle seriously proposed disallowing all dashes from Wikipedia, and just using hyphens instead (also [1]); that didn't go far, but created a lot of heat. At this point, dashes are sort of a third rail that people don't want to touch; a certain amount of energy goes into maintaining a steady voltage, and if you touch it you'll likely be the one burnt. Dicklyon (talk) 04:57, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

FYI, since you've been stuck on ASCII, you might not know that the Mac has had en dash and em dash on the keyboard and in its fonts since it first came out in 1984, in the 8-bit Mac ASCII character set; way before Unicode; and of course they were used in TeX and typography systems way before that. Dicklyon (talk) 05:21, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Oh right, and the original IBM PC used code page 437, one of the many flavors of extended ASCII. Since the link you gave refers to that as ASCII extended, I just created a redirect for that. One thing you find when researching computing timelines is how frequently what you thought was the "first" use of something turns out not to have been, digging deeper often finds another earlier and less-remembered usage. Of course code page 437 was in the back of my head, but I admit it slipped my mind when I said that the dashes were "made possible" by Unicode, and now I stand corrected. But I see that apparently the dashes were not included in CP437, which gave priority to black and white smiley faces and the playing card symbols, which I guess fit into the mindset of the time that graphics (and thus the ASCII extension) were for kids hooking their PCs up to televisions – though of course they worked in monochrome as well. Wbm1058 (talk) 14:12, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Just why Microsoft has steadfastly failed to give simple keystrokes to en and em dashes is a mystery. Tony (talk) 01:41, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

 Note: See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 221#Post–World War II or Post-World War II? for a discussion February–April 2021, which itself references Talk:Post–Cold War era#En dash or hyphen? (25 February 2021 (UTC)), regarding the use of en dashes, e.g.: Post–'World War II' rather than 'Post-World' War II. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 16:13, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Time to bring on a bot to bypass the redirects

Back in 2010, RjwilmsiBot 5 created redirects to pages with dashes, if they did not already exist, and tagged them and existing redirects to pages with dashes with {{R from modification}}, a general category for valid alternative modifications of titles from one form (using a hyphen) to another form (using a dash). Example: Bayh-Dole Act as a valid modification redirect to Bayh–Dole Act.

At 10:13, 24 October 2009 Good Olfactory moved page Bayh-Dole Act to Bayh–Dole Act (WP:ENDASH, per manual of style)

Never mind that my Google search finds the hyphen form to be more common (my broswer search finds 15 hits vs. only five for the en dash). Wikipedia uses MOS:DASH to override the most commonly-used form, because most of the rest of the world outside Wikipedia is just wrong, and stupid for not following our manual of style. OK.

But the DASH proponents did not stop there. They have been systematically declaring the hyphen forms to be redirects from incorrect punctuation, which is essentially the same as misspellings. This is disruptive, as it elevates fixing the cosmetic length of a horizontal line to the same priority as fixing an actual spelling error such as Baye-Dole Act. These demands to fix title cosmetics are flooding the already-backlogged Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings with even more work of marginal importance, and as one of the few suffering gnomes who actually works this list rather than create more work to be piled onto the list, I'm sick of it.

Category:Redirects from modifications has several subcategories, such as from titles with diacritics‎, from plurals‎, and from stylizations, but no "from hyphens to en dashes". I intend to create a new category for that, then write a bot to clear that category. I believe it will be safe for a bot to make these cosmetic edits that only change the length of a line to make it longer, but will not run afoul of WP:COSMETICBOT because editors are demanding gnomes to make these edits. My intention is to boldly work on this project until someone objects. – wbm1058 (talk) 20:33, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

"my Google search finds the hyphen form to be more common" – This is the WP:Common-style fallacy. Journalism (from probably 95% or more of news publishers) does not use en dashes at all, for any purpose (they use hyphens for this particular kind of case, and for use of dashes as parenthetical separators – like this – they use unspaced em dashes. That's a style choice they make, which academic publishers generally do not make. WP (being an encyclopedia, i.e. an academic publication) has an MoS based on the style manuals of academic not news publishers, because WP is not written in news style as a matter of policy (WP:NOT#NEWS). It has nothing to do with anyone being "stupid" for using one character or the other, and putting it in WP:BATTLEGROUND terms like that is never helpful. Anyway, {{R from incorrect hyphenation}} sorting to its own dedicated category and a bot to clean it up seem like a good idea to me. Many uses of {{R from alternative hyphenation}}, however, are also cases like redirects from Bayh-Dole Act to Bayh–Dole Act, so doing what you propose isn't going to catch all of them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:21, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Numeric ranges

Article currently reads:

En dash ... are used:... * in date ranges, such as 1849–1863,

Shouldn't this be in all numerical ranges, e.g., $10–20, 37–42 years? (cf. Dash#Ranges of values). --Macrakis (talk) 23:15, 26 February 2024 (UTC)