Wikipedia:Short horizontal line

There is considerable controversy over the use of short horizontal lines in Wikipedia. This comes about from having three choices:

1. an em-dash (—)
2. an en-dash (–)
3. a hyphen (-)

Looking at the source of this page, one key distinction can immediately be grasped: the only one an editor can directly type is the hyphen. This leads us to an obvious conclusion: if a Wikipedia editor is expected to be able to type it, a hyphen should be used for an en-dash and a double hyphen for an em-dash. Of course, Wikipedia is intended for the convenience of the reader, not the editor, who in any case has numerous options to handle these distinctions. However, redirects with hyphens are required for titles and any likely search terms.

When the issue is purely display formatting, people that care about the distinction between the different flavors of short horizontal lines should feel free to argue about it and generate WP:MOS pages about the topic, so long as they only involve other people that also care about the different flavors of short horizontal lines.