Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27104094-20171125215702/@comment-31763506-20180103180931

OK. It clearly is a case of Windows and Chrome playing a game of silly buggers with me.

I had been editing the page source in my favorite text editor, and that entailed copying and pasting it out of the classic source editor for the wikia page in chrome and into the editor and back again. The wikia source contained Unicode ≤ and ≥ characters, but my text editor is ANSI only, so to "help", the Windows clipboard translated the characters into their nearest ANSI equivalents, which is the ANSI = sign.

There's a workaround for making sure this does not happen again, and while it may not be best practices in terms of wikia management it emphatically is best practice for HTML, and that is to encode the Unicode characters as HTML entities.

So &amp;ge; will code for &ge; and &amp;le; will code for &le;. (That is written for display, not code.)

I'd strongly suggest that encoding Unicode characters as alphanumeric entities on the wiki be adopted as an editorial rule, but (hopefully) using the above two characters for expressing code calculations are the only ones we need to worry about, except maybe &amp;ne; in preference to &ne; or <>. (SL probably isn't going to start throwing in kanji characters for native Erosian speakers and if we are ever tempted to start enforcing consistent standards for straight and smart quotes we should just shoot ourselves and save the mental health/police authorities time and aggravation.)

Using &amp;lt; and &amp;gt; in preference to the ASCII is similarly a web best practice anywhere that generic markup language tags are going to appear. (Note. Someone try and remember to test using &amp;raquo; and &amp;laquo; in Patreon comments the next time they are tempted to use tag delimiting characters for &raquo;emphasis&laquo;.)

If we have a place where such editorial rules are posted...

It should be easy for me to find and fix the instances where I've wrecked these characters in the Investments page, but there may be other cases where I've unwittingly done the same with other pages, so I'm also going to poke around the obvious guide pages with tons of formula and possibly look for a list of my edits.