Template:Single+single/doc

Usage
The ' or ' template is to be used whenever a single-quotation mark or apostrophe (') would be followed by another one for another purpose, not intended to start or end -delimited italic wikimarkup. This is most commonly found in nested quotations, and cultivar epithets, and linguistic glosses (all of which take single quotation marks), when the material they contain begins or ends with an apostrophe. E.g. Its purpose is to prevent mis-parsing as italics, and to place a slight visual space (kerning) in-between the two  marks for legibility, without actually inserting a space character. It does this with CSS, and does so because the insertion of an extraneous space character of any kind (e.g., or &thinsp;) would violate the semantic integrity of web content in an article or another page in which it appears.

For details on why not to manually make a non-breaking-spaced or thin-spaced version that may look similar to the templated output (short version: doing that improperly mixes content and presentation), see Template:Single+double/doc.