1. An assumed standard. ie # via twitter
2. or personal interpretation

The latter would prove most difficult for the average user to adopt. It’s one thing from a development point of view to say, this the standard, moving forward xyz should be accented with such and such character. But end users still use IE6 even though it’s not standards compliant, most people don’t write according to AP or any other guidelines. The examples are plentiful, in my opinion.

I’ve seen people use = for a correction but I’ve seen used more often in my circle the use of * to denote a correction. The latter seems more intuitive to me. I find interesting though that emphasizing the copy immediately following the asterisks reads as a source. Again, to me.

That alone would be the most difficult thing to overcome. Although we could justify the *,@, and perhaps even # in regards to semantic meaning I think $ would be more problematic. As what does the sign actually signify. Currency. That’s it. Used in stocks, it’s a reference to the said stocks “value”, but the stock name itself is not the value, it’s an entity with a value.

Then again, I’m no semantics expert.

Asterisk is still overloaded, it can mean multiplication and is a common wildcard character. But I think those uses are not likely to be confused with *source so, yeah, that could work :)

wiikpeida=wikipedia

or just

=wikipedia

Depending how obvious the error is/how much in a hurry they are to avoid ridicule. ;-)

Not saying your way is incorrect – we’re talking customs rather than rules, after all – but the equals sign does seem to me to be more appropriate for corrections. Asterisks are commonly used in ordinary text to refer to footnotes, so their use to indicate a net source or reference would make sense.

My 2p…

> yeah, I read that on wiikpeida
> *wikipedia

That said, it might be difficult to find an alternative character that does not already have a defined or conventional meaning elsewhere.

I also like Michael’s idea of $APPL.

However, if only developer adopt this across the web, and not normal folk, does it really work?

Note to those who use twitter: there are more of us that don’t use twitter than you think. Actually, that probably goes for any value of “twitter”.