Talk:Pass system (Canadian history)

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Weird formatting/punctuation & impact on readability (Wikipedia manual of style) edit

Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Does anyone else find this article's use of em dashes to be distracting/hard to follow? For example, in the very first sentence:

The pass system was a Canadian federal government Department of Indian Affairs segregationist policy, first initiated on a significant scale in the region that became the three prairie provinces in the wake of the 1885 North-West Rebellion—as part of a series of highly restrictive measures—to confine Indigenous people to Indian reserves—newly-established through the numbered treaties.^{[1][2]: 162–5}

I've never seen anything punctuated like this before, though apparently you can use them in place of en dashes for some things. Wikipedia's manual of style doesn't seem to explicitly forbid using em dashes for interjections, but neither does it say that you can - though, the manual does make it clear that pairs of dashes should never be used more than once per sentence.

Anyway, is there some reason for this? I wanted to ask before editing because I also can't immediately remember seeing anything cited like this^{[1][2]: 162–5} except when quoting passages.Xanthos IV (talk) 19:15, 13 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

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