In the version history of articles, mediawiki displays the size of changes in bytes. When the size of the change is negative, currently a hyphen-minus U+2010 (‐) is used. The correct sign would be the minus-sign U+2212 (−).
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T40579 Size of changes - minus-sign instead of hyphen | |||
| Resolved | cscott | T10327 Language::formatNum() should prefix negative values with − (minus sign U+2212) | |||
| Open | Feature | None | T15025 New parser function / magic word, for "pretty-printed" numbers |
We are using - (hyphen-minus, U+002D) not ‐ (hyphen, U+2010). I'm not sure there's a benefit of using − (minus signm U+2212), given that hyphen-minus can work as a minus and is ASCII compatible.
The code to change would be Language::formatNum() at line 2881 of Language.php
mr.heat wrote:
Set priority to "normal" per user request. I can confirm the current character is wrong. It's a common replacement for the minus sign but since we are using Unicode anyway I don't see a strong reason why the history and diff pages need to be ASCII compatible. They aren't anyway.
mr.heat wrote:
It seems $wgMiserMode is the reason why the character is wrong.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/48986
So basically the bug is that {{formatnum:-12345}} prints negative numbers with the wrong minus character. Why is that? Bug 8327 is closed as "wontfix" without providing a proper reason.