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Wikipedia has the “no original research” rule. Unicode really should have had a similar “no original designs” rule. Too late now — it’s become an annually refr

• chungy 4y ago
  Unicode's stuck to that principle better than Wikipedia has stuck to its principle.
• tokinonagare 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • Name_Chawps 4y ago
    This split already exists. Emoji are kept in a separate block from other characters.
    • mcswell 4y ago
      Not exactly. It's true that they are (mostly) not found in the same block as other (alphabetic, numeric, punctuation etc.) characters. But there is no single emoji block, which makes it hard to write regular expressions to search for emoji, unless you are using a regex language that allows reference to Unicode properties (like Perl, or the Python3 regex library, not to be confused with the more commonly used re library).
  • jurimasa 4y ago
    What makes a writing system such, and why emoji are not a writing system?
    • tokinonagare 4y ago
      Let me introduce 2 websites that can answer your questions : Google and Wikipedia. The former allow you to search website on the called web platform, and the latter is an online collaborative encyclopedia. By using those two websites, you can easily find the definition of a writing system, which is "[...] a method of visually representing verbal communication" and reflect on the fact that since emoji aren't used to encode an oral message, they don't form a writing system.
      • WorldMaker 4y ago
        If you scroll down a bit further you might find Brittanica's better definition: "A writing system, technically referred to as a script or an orthography, consists of a set of visible marks, forms, or structures called characters or graphs that are related to some structure in the linguistic system." Emoji certainly classify as related to a "linguistic system" even if you don't think they have a direct verbal counterpart. Non-verbal languages certainly exist and many of them have forms of writing systems and some of those are encoded in Unicode, too. Emoji isn't the only "writing system for a non-verbal language system" encoded in Unicode.
  • Eisenstein 4y ago
    What makes a meme glyph politically correct and why are they in unicode?
    • hoseja 4y ago
      Fifteen skincolor variants and pregnant men.
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      I guess, literally, all the flag glyphs are very political. I think people mostly mean "i disagree with it politically" when they say something is "political" though. If they disagree with it politically, then it's "political".
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    What is emoji but not an existing writing system?
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    What would this "split" entail exactly? The codepoints obviously still need to be kept distinct if they are to inter-operate. Emoji's are already segregated in their own codepoint ranges. If emojis are what you are annoyed by? You're just suggesting that, like, entirely different personnel be involved (they may already be), or we give a different name to the emojis, just to, like, register your political displeasure with them?
  • hoseja 4y ago
    The serious work of encoding existing writing systems is mostly finished.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    Tf is "politically correct" in these https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-15.0/emoji-released.html https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-15.0/emoji-released.html
• Thing123456 4y ago
  Here's the blog post for the Unicode 15 release: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/09/announcing-unicode-standard-version-150.html https://blog.unicode.org/2022/09/announcing-unicode-standard... A tiny portion consists of "fun fashionable clip art." The vast majority of the changes are new scripts and symbols that allow people to correctly input existing texts.
  • msla 4y ago
    Ah, but the "Zoomer mind rot clip art YOLO YEET SOY LATTE" is what I can use to get all pissy and stuff, so it must be what the Unicode people focus on! /s
• Groxx 4y ago
  I think there's plenty of evidence that people use pictograms. Just look at the millions of discord emoji and chat stickers. In that respect, they're showing remarkable constraint in only adding twenty. tbh my bigger worry is simply around implementation scope and complexity - kinda like browsers, Unicode and text rendering is perpetually getting harder to create new competitors / complete fonts / etc. Emoji are rather small in number and simple to implement though, if somewhat costly to include all those images / complex svgs.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  You can hire a ghostwriter to write a biography about yourself and pay a publishing house for a limited edition print run and voila, you can have your own wikipedia page based on an authorized source. Wikipedia's view of what's 'original research' has alway been a bit murky, on top of that. Are the primary documents that historians rely on acceptable as sources, or only if they've been synthesized by an 'accredited historian' (whatever that is) in book or research journal form? If publishing original research is wrong, why publish a journalist's original research which is incorporated into a newspaper article? What about original research published as a blog post, is that now an acceptable secondary source?
  • skissane 4y ago
    > You can hire a ghostwriter to write a biography about yourself and pay a publishing house for a limited edition print run and voila, you can have your own wikipedia page based on an authorized source It isn’t as easy as you make it sound - to establish notability, they don’t accept self-published / vanity press sources - so you’d need to get your book published by a publisher with an established track record. That’s a lot harder - it is either something that money can’t buy, or at least you’d need a lot lot more money to buy it than self-publishing charges Furthermore, one high quality reliable source is generally not considered enough for notability, they want multiple sources. If you get your biography published, and then get some journalists in established media outlets to publish articles about it, you’ll meet that hurdle too. But if you manage that, you are probably actually are notable, as opposed to just some random nobody trying to buy their way into Wikipedia
• kens 4y ago
  Unicode has completely separate rules for characters and emojis. Characters and scripts generally need solid documentation that they are real existing symbols. Emojis, on the other hand, are accepted largely on how likely they are to be used. My impression is that the Unicode committee would prefer to deal with scripts and characters, but they got stuck with emojis for historical reasons and that's what most people care about. Refs: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html
  • avgcorrection 4y ago
    No, man. Digital communication should follow whatever history for inclusion that text before 1850 did. Write a `:P` (you know: HN and emojis…) as monastic marginalia for three hundred years and then maybe we’ll spare one code point for it.
• chrisshroba 4y ago
  Why shouldn’t emoji be an annually refreshed collection of fun fashionable clip art? That’s exactly how users use emoji - for culturally relevant references. As a user, I get excited to see all the new emoji each release!
  • csande17 4y ago
    The reason why this is a bad idea is that it's hard to remove emoji when they go out of fashion. You can't just pull characters out of the set without breaking the backwards compatibility assumptions made by every programming language that supports Unicode identifiers, and you can't change the meaning of characters without a painful, politically controversial collaboration between every large tech company (see the pistol emoji). Even ZWJ sequences are forever: we're still stuck with the "eye in speech bubble" emoji despite the fact that it's a logo for a defunct anti-bullying campaign that doesn't even have a working website anymore.
    • int_19h 4y ago
      Why does it matter, though? The symbols are already drawn, and the code that handles the emoji range is already written. As for "obsolete" emojis, regardless of the original intent, they will be appropriated in no time if some suitable use comes along; the official name in the Unicode chart is merely a historical curiosity (and, indeed, those names are wrong for many "legitimate" characters, but can't be changed for the same back-compat reasons).
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      Right, but Unicode also has ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in it. Is it actually problematic to include a few more code points?
• legrande 4y ago
  > it’s become an annually refreshed collection of fun fashionable clip art instead of an impartial repository of humankind’s symbols Constraints are sometimes good. It's great to see how something like the Eggplant & Peach emoji got hijacked and used as a sexual reference.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  All threads need at least one irrelevant pet peeve-aside.
• satvikpendem 4y ago
  So what? Unicode follows language and language is descriptivist not prescriptivist.
  • lolinder 4y ago
    Nitpick: language is neither descriptivist nor prescriptivist, language simply is. A modern linguist is generally descriptivist in their approach to language. Aside from that, I don't think the terms really apply to a discussion about emoji, because what makes emoji odd is that they are almost never in common usage as part of the language until Unicode adds them. That makes it very hard to claim that Unicode is describing anything in particular by adding emoji, and in fact makes their role much more prescriptive than not.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  …yet they still don't think about adopting Tengwar.
  • jcranmer 4y ago
    Actually, only Klingon was officially rejected. The Tolkien languages never had a fully-featured proposal to Unicode, but space for them is even tentatively allocated in Unicode (https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/ https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/, U+160xx). Klingon was explicitly rejected for a few reasons. Most prominently, there were serious concerns about Paramount asserting trademark rights over the characters. Especially at the time of its rejection, it wasn't clear that there was any organic use of the script, even among people speaking Klingon (note that in its earliest uses, it wasn't even used consistently as an alphabet for the language it is supposed to represent). Those reasons don't apply to Tengwar--and it's also been noted since then that the Unicode committee might look more favorably on a newer proposal for Klingon.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  > Unicode really should have had a similar “no original designs” rule. I think it does, doesn't it? Here is some info on unicode rules for new characters, although there doesn't seem to be a single succinct statement, and there are slightly different standards for different categories ("letters" vs symbols vs emojis). But I am pretty sure you can't just make up a character and succesfully submit it to unicode on the argument that it would be useful, this thing you just made up; it has to have already established use to get into unicode, generally. http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html Which characters are you annoyed by specifically? It's true there are separate rules for emoji's, which are... weird. I seem to recall unicode initially tried to resist emoji's at least to some extent, before just giving in. But emoji's are actually pretty clear, to me, as a success of unicode. People want them, they have achieved pretty widespread use globally, and if that's going to be so, we benefit from them being encoded in a standard vendor-neutral way. We're far better off with emoji's in unicode than, say, every vendor using their own non-standard use of private codepoints. (Unless you argue that if they weren't in unicode they wouldn't have caught on; I am sympathetic to the argument that we'd better off without emoji's, but I'm pretty sure if they weren't in unicode we'd still have them, just non-standardly). Here are some of the guidelines for which emoji's will be encoded in unicode: https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors It's a bit fuzzy, but you generally can't simply get a new thing you just invented encoded in unicode on the argument that it's cool.
  • xjay 4y ago
    The private unicode range is often used for icons on many web sites, but downloadable fonts are considered optional on the web, so we're left with unintelligible hex codes instead, at which point we've regressed to a pre-accessibility era when images typically didn't come with alt text, but at least there was a fallback mechanism.
• ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  You should read an emoji submission form. You have to prove that the emoji would be culturally relevant and useful before it's added.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  What’s the difference between fashionable clip art and humankind’s symbols? It feels like there’s this bias where people think they know what’s relevant and what’s just nonsense from the younger generation or what have you. Mind you, Unicode stresses me out. It’s trying to catalog something that’s impossible to because it’s arbitrary and limitless. And it’s doing it within the arena of software engineering where we really crave rules and clear boundaries. But if we didn’t try, we’d be worse off. Unicode is in some ways a horror, but it’s valuable, even if flawed.