The easy quotation marks ("""") are not German. Should German questions and answers be edited to conform to this? I think that they yield a more professional impression.
4 Answers
Personally I think the focus should be more on the content. But by now I'm aware that most people think the other way which is fine by me.
Two things:
- EL&U already automatically converts quotes. Is this active here too? Maybe we can have that solution with German quotes. But then there is the problem with questions asked in English...
- I just noticed that the font bug might not be that critical in the long term. The site uses Tahoma only because it's in Beta. EL&U for example uses Georgia which renders the quotes correctly. Until the issue is fixed, some titles might be a bit irritating. I really don't know whether to make heads or tails of the title of this question without copying it into a word processor...
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2I think that 1 isn't possible to implement, since the "normal" quotes would have to be used in English texts.– Tim ModCommented Jun 25, 2011 at 20:51
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Questions and answers should only be corrected, if they are fresh. Else they will jump into the front of the list of actual content, only for the reason the quotation marks changed. This shouldn't happen. Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 2:03
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@userunknown Yeah, and while we're at it we should not allow comments to 15 month old questions and answers.– musiKkCommented Oct 23, 2012 at 7:57
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@musiKk: Why not? Questions and answers, as well as the comments supplementing them, can be found and read by interested visitors years later, at which point it is irrelevant whether a particular comment was added a minute or a decade after the question or answer. Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 12:30
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@O.R.Mapper It was sarcasm (granted, maybe not that obvious). I find the idea just as bad as the one I referenced.– musiKkCommented Dec 30, 2014 at 12:42
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@musiKk: Oh, ok. In any case, these comments now nicely illustrate why comments should be allowed to arrive much later ;) And I agree with you, I think if anything, a more viable alternative would be making the SE backend a bit more intelligent so it can distinguish between edits that changed the content and edits that just changed the formatting/replaced some symbols (and even that sounds risky, as a replacement of
<with>can be intentional and significantly change a text). Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 12:45
Sorry I don't know how to post images in comments. This is the reply to Hendrik Vogt
That is waht I see on Wie wird das e in „Genus“ ausgesprochen?.
And the closing quotation mark is terribly wrong.
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3That's definitely something that needs to be fixed! I don't know how many votes we need for the SE team to take notice.– Tim ModCommented Jun 25, 2011 at 11:30
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Interesting! I see indeed different quotation marks, and the ones I see are good. I also find the closing quotation mark in your picture terribly wrong, but that's the fault of the font designer. (If you want to post an image in a comment, upload it via the "Ask Question" form, don't submit the question, and then include the link like this:
.) Commented Jun 25, 2011 at 12:06 -
@Hendrig: I have the same problem as bernd_k. Misterben wrote in a comment to the linked post: "One of my computers doesn't have Tahoma available so falls back to a Helvetica-like font. It's a huge improvement."– Tim ModCommented Jun 25, 2011 at 14:33
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@Tim: Yes, this must be it. Thanks! (Note that I saw your comment only since I was visiting this post anyway - you got a typo in my name.) Commented Jun 25, 2011 at 14:43
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Main post for the font bug: meta.german.stackexchange.com/questions/56/…– chirluCommented Jul 2, 2015 at 11:47
I see that you just edited a question to give it the fancy German quotation marks. In this case, the quotation marks also were in the title. I think we should strive to have really good titles for the questions, so for this case I strongly support such edits. I wouldn't edit a question just to change quotation marks in the body.
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I can't say, that the result in this example looks good. The ending quotation mark has to be inclined like slash and not like a backslash.– bernd_kCommented Jun 25, 2011 at 10:52
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1@bernd: Hmm, I seem to see different things than you do. Can you post a screenshot? But whatever, if this site manages to graduate from beta, then we'll get a new design and different fonts anyway. Commented Jun 25, 2011 at 11:08
In my opinion we should disregard the german quotes completely. I am german and I don't see the appreciation for them. They don't clarify anything but are only bothering people to ask themselves which one they should use.
;-)"text"than it is to type„text“, it will be a problem.„“. On the other hand, in many office programs it's indeed not a problem since you have pretty good auto-conversion. Also in TeX (with[german]{babel}) it's very easy.AltGr+y(»),AltGr+x(«),AltGr+v(„),AltGr+b(“) andAltGr+n(”).