Quick question about grave accents
Backticks (a.k.a. grave accents) are executable in most shells. There is no good reason to use them in English prose instead of straight or curly quotes, which is why the context of the messages in question leads me to believe they are meant to be executable. The qqq should clarify whether this is the case or not.
No. The most probabable reason is that it initially was using Markdown instead of the Mediawiki syntax for a monospaced font or text input (like in HTML with "code", "kbd", "tt" elements). It is not meant at all to be executable as is. this is just specifying text that can only be used verbatim (and normally not translated... except that we don't know what is in $1: if it was real code, the backticks would be part of the code and escaped inside $1, but here they are left outside of $1, meaing clearly that they are purely presentational and not semantic at all, so they are just used as a form of visual emphasis and backquotes should not be even present (or if they are, they should be correct quotation marks for the target language (and if quotation marks are really shown, there should not evben be any additional emphasing with italics or other font styles or decorations, the quotation marks being enough by themselves (and any other decoration being clearly redundant, according to almsot all typography handbooks for French at least, but even for English as well!).