I'm noticing these weirdly placed question marks in a lot of entries. What is their purpose?

I see that, Lee Anne. It might have to do with your character encoding choice. I have mine set to Unicode because I use Cyrillic half of the time, and I see the question marks in some entries. When I set the coding to Western, the question marks disappear.

How do I change that?

On my computer, I click on "view," click on "character encoding," and choose "Western." If you already have Western, then that's not the reason you're seeing them.

nice try!
I changed it to Western and am still seeing the question mark...even remembered the shift-refresh thing.

I haven't noticed question marks like that and didn't have a clue about "character encoding" so went searching after reading Zuzu's post and see that mine is listed as text encoding and it's set on default whatever that means. It's the first at the top of the list with a check mark next to the word Default, next says Western (ISO Latin I) and then Western (Mac OS Roman). LOL, I thought I'd play around and change it to see what happens but I guess I better leave it alone or I might really mess things up and then have to have someone tell me how to get back to where it should be.

Hmmm... Then I'm stumped. Sorry.

Well, I just tried it on IE and over there the thing's called just plain "encoding" and it's set to "Auto-select" and "Unicode." On IE I see a little box instead of a question mark. It seems to be a response to the "apostrophe-s-hyphen" sequence because it only appears in names saying "lady's-slipper" and doesn't appear in the other entry on the search page saying "Lady's Slipper." It goes away when I switch to "Western."

Zuzu is on the right track here, but those special characters are bugs that should be edited out. If you see them, considering submitting a "Edit plant name" proposal. The presence of such a character mark will completely empty out that field, so you have to remember what the name was and re-type the whole thing.

These are artifacts from when I transferred the database from cubits over to ATP and as we find them and fix them, they will eventually all be gone and this won't be an issue anymore.

ok...so it is the apostrophe-s-hyphen thing?

If so we could just copy the whole name then paste it into the new edit, backspacing the hyphen out...no?

Right indeed.

Good thinking Lee Anne.

hehehe...only because I know I could never remember some of those names in the database!!

Necessity is the mother of invention.