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My ideal encyclopedia does not have hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the important differences between en dash, em dash, minus and hyphen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600342

Here's fifteen thousand words of discussion about en and em dashes and hyphens and minus signs. And at the end of that one discussion? No consensus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...

And this is about punctuation. Imagine what it's like on actually contentious issues - Balkans wars, various islands claimed by more than one territory. Etc.



I happen to be a typophile; so, those discussions are interesting to me.

On the other hand, those are probably just examples of bike shedding[1]. The various talk pages on the Balkan Wars articles range from about 9,000 to 15,000 words, for instance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality




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