4 ms·

> I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipe

by Hello71 11y ago

> I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre.... HN has easily several million words on Apple. Here's a search https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1262304000&dateEnd=1546387200 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix... that doesn't mean that it is impossible for anyone to know anything about the culture and the policies on HN.

bane 11y ago
Posting something on HN about Apple without knowing the history of the conversation here won't do much to you except maybe a downvote. Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.
DanBC 11y ago
But my search is specifically about Wikipedia process. Those half million words are not about dashes as an encyclopedic article, those words are people bickering over, for example, "Mexican–American War" versus "Mexican-American War" (at least 20,000 words just on the hyphen / dash in the title). Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use. That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out. But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.

by Hello71 11y ago

bane 11y ago

Posting something on HN about Apple without knowing the history of the conversation here won't do much to you except maybe a downvote. Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.

DanBC 11y ago

But my search is specifically about Wikipedia process. Those half million words are not about dashes as an encyclopedic article, those words are people bickering over, for example, "Mexican–American War" versus "Mexican-American War" (at least 20,000 words just on the hyphen / dash in the title). Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use. That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out. But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.