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Beland(talk·contribs·blocks·protections·deletions·page moves·rights·RfA) has thrice removed the   from inside the guillemets for French quotations. Only on the third time did they finally explain, non-breaking space is not needed inside {{nowrap}}, so regular space can be used for clarity. 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 | =Λ= | 02:25, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Fourthords: 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#Guillemets 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)[reply]
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  , 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 | =Λ= | 21:39, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
