Talk:Disappearance of Pauline Picard

quotations
has thrice removed the &#8197; from inside the guillemets for French quotations. Only on the third time did they finally explain,. The use of the HTML isn't for non-breaking, though. It's used because the 1⁄4-em spacing is the proper gap between the punctuation and the text, and MOS:CONFORM says to "follow the rules for correct punctuation in that language." I hope that my instigation of this discussion on Beland's behalf won't incite administrative retaliation; I'm just hoping for clarity and explanation. Thanks, all. —  Fourthords  &#124; =Λ= &#124; 02:25, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Ah, sorry for the confusion and thanks for the clarification! I assumed what 8197 was for without checking, and didn't notice I'd made the same change on the previous scan. As you say, it's actually U+2005 FOUR-PER-EM. Taking a look at French Wikipedia, fr:Wikipédia:Conventions typographiques says that a regular space is fine. In the spirit of "keep markup simple" (which is the motivation for this numeric HTML entity scan) I would lean toward doing that here on English Wikipedia as well? It might not be what a professional French typesetter does, but we eschew that sort of thing in favor of simplicity sometimes, like preferring straight quote marks instead of the curved quotes a professional English typesetter would probably use. -- Beland (talk) 02:48, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
 * No worries, I just was worrying about risking the ire of an administrator. Oh, I definitely can't read French that well, so points to you for checking their MOS.  Here's a question I didn't have until now, does &#8197;, in addition to being a quarter-em space, also function as a non-breaking space?  Because if the HTML code is performing both functions, we could eschew the nowrap in favor of the code for being both accurate and non-breaking.  —   Fourthords  &#124; =Λ= &#124; 21:39, 31 January 2023 (UTC)