Talk:Religious and political symbols in Unicode

Untitled
such cross † aren't presented. Also orthodoxal-- Albedo  @  12:12, 16 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The orthodox cross is (was) there, and I believe the one you present is a dagger. ⇔ ChristTrekker 14:24, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Swahlika symbols
Just to be clear, the four swaxika symbols in the Tibetan block are intended for religious usage (Hindu, Buddhist, Bon ...), whereas the CJK swastxa symbols are intended for use in Han ideographic text. None of these symbols is intended or appropriate to represent the Nazi swaxika which has a distinctly different glyph shape and is often rotated 45 degrees. BabelStone (talk) 21:46, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
 * You're right. I edited the previous version into: nowhere is swxstika the official name (but it gives a wiki-link). But they have a "common meaning" or so (like the Irish shamlock, "let's not forget" as the editor said}. Also, two of the Tibetian four are with dots, which is completely irrelevant to Europe. Still, graphically, it could be that the CJK pair is the same as the first Tibetian pair. Unicode could have known this. And again, to all friends of the big windmill: there is a left- and a right-pointing one. Do not mix them, babies! Someone will call you a, eh, baby! ~-DePiep (talk) 00:38, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * One of the main reasons for encoding the four characters in the Tibetan block (I was one of the co-authors of the proposal) was because the CJK characters have CJK properties and their glyphs are "full width" and usually in the style of Han ideographs (drawn as a sequence of brush strokes rather than a single fluid design), and so are inappropriate for use in non-Han text. Additionally the CJK characters have the Han script property, whereas the four new characters are script-neutral. Their placing in the Tibetan block (rather than the Miscellaneous Symbols block) and their choice of names "svasti" rather than you know what was deliberately to make it clear that they are religious symbols used by Tibetans and others. (The original plan was to give them Tibetan character names, but India requested they have the svasti names.) BabelStone (talk) 01:03, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Synthesis
The tag "Synthesis" (that is, WP:SYNTHESIS, as an WP:OR) is here since May 2010. But the adding editor has not started a Talk here. I suggest that if the tag-claim is not substantialised here shortly, we remove the tag. -DePiep (talk) 20:30, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Almost three months later, and still nothing. ⇔ ChristTrekker 21:35, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

This page essentially lists the Miscellaneous Symbols and Dingbats ranges, plus it lists six swastika characters from the Tibetan and Chinese scripts, the Arabic Allah ligature, some obscure ancient punctuation mark, plus the encircled Latin A which it decides is close enough to the anarchism symbol. This is basically the textbook definition of WP:SYNTH. "oh, here is a Unicode glyph which reminds me of something or other, let's make a list of those". Here is a well-kept secret: Unicode encodes characters, not glyphs. The characters stand for whatever the Unicode consortium says they do. If their shape (as realized in the Unicode charts or elsewhere) remind you of some symbol or other, that's nice, you can use it in your emails the same way you use emoticons. This does not mean you should embark on writing an encyclopedia article about it. I seriously doubt that Unicode has characters for "asshole, homosexual" or for "Nazism". If you think they should add these, you can always submit a request and wait for a later version of Unicode. (actually, weirdly enough, I suppose there is one for "homosexual" after all, at ⚣. If you want to use this as an insult, that's semantics and not a question of a character set. You could also create a font where it appears as a rude gesture or something, that's all in the font, not in the character encoding.

What were people thinking? And how on earth can you require that "the tag-claim" should be "substantiated"? The burden of establishing that this page describes anything at all coherent lies with whoever created this page, or wishes to keep it around. Also, the word allah, even when written as a ligature, is not a "symbol of Islam". It is a symbol of the word allah, meaning "God". --dab (𒁳) 17:14, 25 January 2012 (UTC)
 * -"tag should be substantiated" - yes, because else it is a vacuum statement. And you just did, which is the way to improve the page. I have little respect for editors who just put a tag and don't show up at Talk.
 * -Your remarks saying 'it's not about Unicode, the problem is in the "font" and "glyph"' is not correct. It is the outside meaning & weight attributed to a symbol (Unicode encoded, presented in glyph or font).
 * -The sign you use as an example is noted by Unicode with "= male homosexuality" as alternative name. So that is not SYNTHESIS, it's a definition (your own impression is irrelevant; I'd say wrong example).
 * -In short, the part from "Here's a secret" onwards could be omitted.
 * -That said, I agree: it is SYNTHESIS, starting with the title. A Meaning of symbols - endless in every dimension. I would support an AfD. -DePiep (talk) 01:36, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * To be short: let's go AfD. -DePiep (talk) 02:57, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
 * What's wrong with the title? Cultural, political, and religious symbols in Unicode. These are "cultural, political, and religious symbols" and they are "in Unicode". The table column is "related meaning" (emphasis added). There's no intention here of trying to trick readers into believing that it is the prescriptive or definitive meaning of the character. As you correctly said, it's the outside meaning assigned to glyphs that happen to match the normative description of characters encoded by Unicode. ⇔ ChristTrekker 20:46, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
 * This page never was an attempt at listing or detailing the prescribed meaning of Unicode characters. That's already been done elsewhere. And no one is making a claim that the Unicode Consortium encoded "symbol for France" or "rude gesture toward homosexuals". Nonetheless, many cultures have associated some meanings (beyond the inherent) with the representations commonly used for those characters. (E.g. the fleur-de-lis, encoded at U+269C, is associated with France, and the "OK" hand sign, encoded at U+1F44C, is used in some places as a rude gesture.) There is value in listing this. You may be able to call it WP:SYNTH but I don't see how "reach[ing] or imply[ing] a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources" is done here. There is no thesis here, so there's no conclusion: just a list of fact. I don't think WP:OR applies at all, actually. I haven't confirmed for all, but I'd say it highly likely that the symbol↔meaning associations listed here are mentioned on the (linked) pages for at least one if not both. One can legitimately say unreferenced applies, but if the only complaint is that someone hasn't gone through the tedium of copying the references from the other articles, that's weak, IMO.
 * If you delete a list like this, I don't see why one should keep list of tallest buildings (for example) either. They don't add anything—the information exists in the individual articles. But the consolidation of facts into a single place adds utility; it is useful to see them presented in that fashion. ⇔ ChristTrekker 20:46, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
 * re ChristTrekker. What's wrong with the title?, you ask. Well, this is. Unicode does not define symbols as "cultural", "political", "religious" and such. Unicode does not.
 * So, associating a Unicode character (symbol) with a political issue, is an editors choice, and therefore OR or POV or SYNTHESIS or whatever. If in the page Ireland there were a reference saying "the Irish shamlock is encoded in Unicode at U+...", I am fine: that is the direction to go. NOT should some editor introduce (WP:OR) that the Unicode character is associated with Ireland. Wrong direction of associating. -DePiep (talk) 23:51, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
 * But this is just a collection of all those references in one place. Nothing original is being added here. These are glyphs (okay, more pedantically: characters typically represented by certain glyphs which are) widely recognized as significant culturally/etc, and they are in Unicode. That's all that is being said. No one here is making up the association out of the ether, just like no one (hypothetically) made up your Ireland example. If you're saying that multiple "forward" associations of entities to their Unicode encodings are acceptable and yet having a single "reverse" association of code points to various entities "represented" is not, then I'm sorry but I just don't get that logic. Show me a WP guideline that clearly addresses this issue specifically, because I've read WP:POV (what editorial POV is being injected?), WP:SYNTH (what conclusion is being advanced by joining unrelated facts?), WP:OR (just a collection of facts from elsewhere on the wiki, so what's original?) and I don't see that they can be construed to prohibit this type of article.
 * I think the real objection is simply that some editors don't feel that the commonality between these characters is strong enough to justify the existence of this list article, that the appearance of certain cultural elements in Unicode is essentially just coincidence and thus trivial and insignificant. If that is the case, the relevant guideline is probably WP:NOTE. ⇔ ChristTrekker 15:09, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I have taken great care to avoid WP:SYNTH and base this on primary and secondary sources, i.e. the Unicode Consortium itself designating its characters "Religious and political symbols", and third party commentators going on about how Unicode is going wild with ideological symbols. In my opinion, the Unicode Consortium has lost it completely, years ago. What happened to creating a character set? If there are legacy issues, sure, define characters that capture other standards. Apart from that, they should never have started to mess with font variants, ligatures and precombined characters (if only to force font designers and OS / word processing software designers to finally use OpenType properly). The day the Unicode Consortium started to do "hammer and sickle" and "homosexuality" symbols, they basically joined the "culture of being offended" party as an active agent, and they are now an instance of defining which ideological symbols are or are not decent, acceptable or notable. This is crazy, how was it not complicated enough to encode the world's writing systems? Clearly, communism and homosexuality are just as offensive to some people as fascism or religious fundamentalism are to others. So the Unicode Consortium is now basically married to the idea of providing codepoints to arbitrarily radical or marginal extremist symbols as they are made up by people. Not to mention random pop culture trivia. Vulcan greeting? Victory symbol? Flipping the bird? Various logos of "cult" franchises? The national symbol of the Islamic Republic of Iran? Then why not the US flag? And by extension all 190 national flags, plus all regional flags, all proposed regional flags, nationalist symbols. You started doing smileys? Meet a gazillion of emoticons close to the heart of every Japanese teenager, go encode them. Et cetera, et ceterorum. I used to be a fan of Unicode in the early 2000s, but this has long gone beyond any reasonable bounds of self-restraint. --dab (𒁳) 16:03, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Especially with "skin tone variant" modifiers going into 8.0. 😛 But this page has been gutted now anyway, so whatever. As an aside, I'll make the observation that with 9.0 it looks like we'll be only one symbol away from being able to have single-character representations of the 5 major US political parties, though: 🐘, &#x1f985;, 🗽, 🌻. So why stop now... ⇔ ChristTrekker 22:12, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

࿊ tibetan symbol nor bu nyis -khyil
What does "࿊ tibetan symbol nor bu nyis -khyil" mean?  Kutchkutch  talk 22:21, 29 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It's equivalent to the Yin Yang symbol ☯ BabelStone (talk) 23:07, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Flags
Flags are political symbols too. An example for something happening now is the flag of Afghanistan 🇦🇫 - should it become the Taliban one? --188.64.207.197 (talk) 17:52, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Flags are implemeted in the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block. It uses two characters from U+1F1E6–U+1F1FF representing letters A-Z which is converted to the flag based on ISO-code. For example 🇦🇫 (AF / U+1F1E6 and U+1F1EB) represents Afghanistan. This way the Unicode standard does not really decide the flag look, it is part of the font provided by the platform.--BIL (talk) 21:52, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Five Fingered Hand of Eris
I'd like to suggest ERIS FORM ONE, also known as Five-Fingered Hand of Eris for inclusion. It is a religious symbol, but I know that just like anything discordian it will be a point of contention so I'm putting it here instead of including it right away. I'm also unsure how to properly include and source this. 212.79.110.207 (talk) 11:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Looking at Discordianism, it seems that is derived from the Five-Fingered Hand of Eris as opposed to actually being the Five-Fingered Hand of Eris.  That makes me hesitant to add it.  If it is added, I'd recommend using L2/16-173 Eris and Sedna Symbols as the reference. DRMcCreedy (talk) 15:32, 5 November 2022 (UTC)