Forum:SH:Pipelinking possessives

Howdy!

Recently a bot changed all instances of  yyy's to  yyy's in Wookieepedia. (Here is one example of probably hundreds.)

This seems like a regression, as yyy's is both more semantically logical and more in line with longstanding typographic convention:


 * In a possessive, the  is essentially a shorthand for "belonging to." That is, "your father's lightsaber" is an abbreviated way of saying "the lightsaber belonging to your father."  Putting that into wiki markup, we would write, "the lightsaber belonging to your father."  Thus, we should also write " your father's lightsaber."  Writing " your father's lightsaber" is logically equivalent to writing "the lightsaber belonging to your father," which no one would consider correct.


 * In professionally printed works, the typesetting of a possessive ' does not automatically take on the typesetting of the term forming the possessive. For example, go all the way back to page 1 of 1979's Han Solo at Stars' End.  Here you will see "the Millennium Falcon cockpit," not "the Millennium Falcon's cockpit": that is, the ' is in roman even though the word Falcon is in italics.  This typographic convention is consistent in published Star Wars works over the decades.  (It is not limited to Star Wars works, and goes back much further than 1979, but Star Wars typographic convention is most relevant here, so I'm limiting my examples to that.) Printed matter does not have hyperlinks, of course, but extrapolating from this widespread typographic practice makes it clear how hyperlinks ought to be handled.

My question, then, is twofold:


 * 1) Can anyone provide solid arguments in favor of the yyy's construction?
 * 2) Has site consensus about this ever been established? Nothing about this is in the Manual of Style, where any such consensus ought to be documented.

Thank you! Asithol (talk) 01:22, September 26, 2016 (UTC)