Talk:The Hardware Wars and the future of free software

Information about this edition
Edition	Originally given at the Free Software Foundation 2006 Associate Member Meeting on 1 April 2006.
Source	transcribed from the recording available at [1] by 194.47.143.2
Contributor(s)	194.47.143.2
Level of progress
Notes
Proofreaders

Quotes

User:R8Rooy just removed all Unicode quotes “” ‘’ and replaced them with ASCII pseudo-quotes "" ' '. I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure the Wikipedia/Wikisource spirit is to keep the existing form and style of an article unless there is an existing policy arguing for a change. I don’t think there is such a policy in this case, and I would argue against it if there was one. User:R8Rooy called the Unicode quotes “fancy quote [which is not] on my keyboard”. If that’s the problem, what harm were the quotes doing already in the article? Were they taunting him, “Neener neener, you can’t type us!”? ☺ I am not objecting to his valuable and helpful corrections to the article (for which I am grateful, as we all are, I hope). I just want the article to look its best. Having Unicode quotes in the article does not hinder anyone from editing the article using whatever tools they have and whatever characters they can type. I have restored the nicer quotes. --193.11.177.69 06:11, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

My case was that I was searching for a typo which was "the're", and I couldn't type the correct quote to find where it is in the page. Of course I could have just used the normal search box in my browser instead of incremental search, or copy the apostrophe from the text. Your suggestion poked me to find a guideline, and the Help:Adding_texts page do favor ASCII characters. I'm going to revert to my edit, and replace the double quotes also. -- R8Rooy 20:48, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

The reference you give to support ASCII-only, Help:Adding texts, actually says “plaintext[sic] or ASCII”. I think Unicode text qualifies as plain text. The original edit which introduced the term “ASCII” seemed to use it as a synonym for "plain text" as opposed to files from word processing programs. I don’t really want to repeat the old (now archived) discussion from Wikipedia about this, as the issue seems to be settled both there and in Wikimedia. Please supply a good argument to not go with Wikipedia and the rest of Wikimedia on this. Otherwise, I will change the quotes back to Unicode quotes. --193.11.177.69 01:51, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

I have no objection now. Thanks for clearing it up. -- R8Rooy 04:21, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

All right then. I have now restored the Unicode quotes. Thank you for taking the time to make the texts on Wikisource better! --193.11.177.69 02:05, 4 June 2007 (UTC)