I don’t remember \ (backslash) ever being the open door/window character. I was going to say it’s always been the ’ (single quote), but then I decided to search the project history, and found that in the very first version of terrain.json, it was a " (double quote), likely due to automatic conversion:
"name": "open wood door",
"symbol": "\"",
I then went back to 0.1, looking for what it was in the very first release of DDA:
{"open wood door", '\'', c_brown, 2, tr_null,
mfb(flammable2)|mfb(transparent)|mfb(supports_roof)},
The same thing shows in Whales’s first ever commit to the Cataclysm (not DDA!) repo:
{"open wood door", '\'', c_brown, 2,
mfb(transparent)},
I’m purely guessing, but I think the wiki page creator (whether a person or a bot) misunderstood the backslash. The backslash is escaping the " or ’ so they don’t close the string/char literal, i.e., so that you can have the literal quote character be part of the quoted thing.
But in any case, it’s really only ever been a quote mark. Maybe a mod could be made to override a terrain symbol?