What's the value of edits which replace quotation characters and apostrophes?

Question

I recently ran across this edit, which included changing the double quote character one gets when typing on a keyboard (Unicode U+0022 Quotation Mark) to “ (U+201C Left Double Quotation Mark) and ” (U+201D Right Double Quotation Mark), and the apostrophe generated by typing (U+0027 Apostrophe) to ’ (U+2019 Right Single Quotation Mark). Titles of questions in German are also edited to replace U+0022 Quotation Mark characters with inward guillemets (» and «)¹. This is what word processors do presumably to make the text more aesthetically appealing. Currently, the following warning appears on the Edit page:

We welcome all constructive edits, but please make them substantial. Avoid trivial edits unless absolutely necessary.

Aside from the link to Leo (which the user didn't have enough reputation to include), the formatting change from code to italics, and the fact that a right single quotation mark is semantically different than an apostrophe, what's the value of such an edit? What what edits are "absolutely necessary"? If it were important, the site could decide to convert and/or render the characters in question in the "improved" version automatically without the need for human intervention, thus saving editors (particularly its more engaged ones) an enormous amount of time.

As a new user coming from Stack Overflow, reputation is used to gauge a user's standing on the site, not whether they can perform menial tasks that a computer can do faster and are only intended for aesthetic reasons. In this sense, I find reputation gained from such edits to be a misrepresentation of the user's standing. This was cleared up by @chirlu in the comments: "High-rep users who have the edit privilege don’t get reputation for their edits." However, a low-rep user could conceivably gain reputation with such edits, so this question really focuses on the hypothetical case of users amassing rep through repeated edits like these.

I don't know the editor or how many edits like the one linked there are, but just looking at the OP's history alone yields another example of such an edit. Looking at the open questions yields an example of the guillemet edit. As a programmer, I struggle to understand why someone would spend so much time and effort on something like this, but I'm happy to be enlightened.

Edit

I'm perfectly fine with ruffling some feathers with my question and my statements about how I perceive such edits personally. That's a sign that people feel strongly about this, and that's a good thing. However, what's important here is that the community can reflect, have an open discussion and reach some level of consensus. So, if you have an opinion about why this should or shouldn't be the case, then please compose an answer which addresses why you feel this adds value and improves the question (or not) so that it can be voted on by others to measure its degree of consensus within the community.

Cheers.

¹ : I pasted these from Wikipedia and haven't checked whether they match the actual character being replaced in questions.

Answer 1

Since I was the user in question, I may add my thoughts on this issue, too, even though they don’t differ too strongly from Wrzlprmft’s.

I can’t remember whether I used to make such edits below the reputation bar that allows free editing of every post. I do know that I definitely overused that type of edit, e.g. to gain the archaeologist, copy editor or refiner badges. To gain any really notable reputation gain from edits would require tons of edits though — remember that 1000 rep would be 100 answer upvotes but 500 approved edits, so the reputation a typical user gains from upvotes will usually greatly outweigh that from edits. If it doesn’t, we may have to consider reputation farmers, but I think that we have appropriate measures to ‘deal’ with that type of issue.

The main reason why I decide to change those characters into other ones is beauty. I find the typographic apostrophes and quotation marks more appealing to the eye than the typewriter ones. That said, of course there is no requirement to use them, that would go way overboard.

Like Wrzl, many times I remove typewriter quotation marks in favour of italic or blockquote markdown rather than typographic quotation marks. And also, the single most frequent substitution is turning ' into ’.

I also try to respect what others seem to want used. If someone used the typewriter apostrophes in German texts, I replace them with Gänsefüßchen („“), whereas I would use Chevrons (»«) if some type of >< is used. And finally, if I have reason to believe the post creator be Swiss, I would use Guillemets the Swiss way («»). In English, I replace single with single and double with double. My personal preferences are Chevrons in German and single quotation marks in English, but I’m not going to force that on any post — save if required quotation marks are omitted altogether.

I sincerely hope nobody ever felt disrupted or anything by my edits. If they did, I humbly apologise and will make note not to edit their posts any longer.

As a side note, the entire process cannot be automated. It is already semi-automated in question titles and leads to English typographic apostrophes being used for German titles. And not even the type of apostrophe can be correctly predicted:

’Twas in the night before Christmas.

Answer 2

As one of the persons performing such edits, here are my rationales for these:

• I would not edit a post only for making said replacements. It’s only a bonus to some more important edit.

• When I edit, I substitute the majority of quotation marks with something other than quotation marks, namely blockquotes or italics. What exactly I use depends strongly on the context and cannot be automatised anyway.

• The only mostly consistent replacement is to replace U+0027 (') with the typographical apostrophe (U+2019, ’). While this would be pretty secure for auto-replacing when occurring within a word (e.g., don't → don’t), it cannot be automatised well when occurring outside of words due to possible confusion with single quotation marks.

• As elaborated here, you probably overestimate the effort going into tiny edits. Moreover, I have all the charcters in question directly available on my keyboard.

• The main value of typographic quotation marks („“”»«) is that they distinguish between closing and opening marks, which enhances readability. In addition, guillemets (»«) are considered to be less disturbing than the other ones as they don’t stick out as much when skimming the text (which is something that we do a lot more than most people think), but are still clearly noticeable when actually reading the text.

Answer 3

I don't see much value in typografic quotation marks. My keyboardsettings don't include such by default, and since I'm not in the literature-buisiness, I don't need them on a daily basis to remember shortcuts.

Afaik, there are even a lot of conventions, i.E. („ and “), the same horizontally mirrored, and (>> and <<) and mirrored again, more common in the US, in France, in Germany.

If somebody edits my posts, I don't roll them back. I live since 25 years with e-mail and classic "quotation" and didn't miss anything all the time.

If somebody is out for reputation -- that's fine. Btw.: I don't distinguish Viertelgeviertsstrich, Bindestrich, Trennstrich and other funky characters too -- the context almost always clarifies, how it is meant, doesn't it?

Automatic replacement should be avoided, at least in code blocks.