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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Rajanala Samyak (talk | contribs) at 01:53, 3 May 2019. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Proposed moves of unicode block articles

– A little more than half of the articles about unicode character blocks have the qualifier "(Unicode block)", the others (listed above) don't. I propose to rename the latter so that all of them do. Here are some reasons:

  1. The current names are not descriptive of the subjects. A name like "Control Pictures", "Geometric Shapes", "Mathematical Operators", "Greek and Coptic" or even "Latin Extended-B" gives no clue that the topic of the article is a section of a specific computer character set.
  2. The current names are not specific to the subject of the article. Even names like "Greek Extended" or "Miscellaneous Symbols", that one could infer are about character encodings, could apply to other character sets, besides Unicode, that were in use in the rather recent past, and would still deserve articles of their own.
  3. The naming of the Unicode blocks is not consistent. The fact that only half of the articles have the "(Unicode block)" qualifier causes difficulties for editors and potential confusion for readers. For example, an editor intending to link to an article on the history and use of Braille system may link to Braille Patterns instead by mistake.
  4. The articles violate the Wikipedia standards for titles. Many of the unqualified Unicode block articles are in the plural, have unnecessary capitalizations, or violate the standards in other ways. For example, to satisfy the standards the article Mathematical Operators should be named Mathematical operator. But of course that is not the name of the Unicode block; and it is the name of an article with a very different subject. Adding the qualifier "(Unicode block)" would satisfy the naming standards, besides avoiding confusion.
  5. Those topics are not very notable and are only of specialized and ephemeral technical interest. The division of the Unicode character space into blocks is mostly an artifact of the way the Unicode Consortium discusses, approves, and documents proposals to include characters. It has only tenuous (and often very questionable) connections to the history, usage, or semantics of those characters.
    The division is relevant only to those who are interested in the history of Unicode, or who intend to propose new symbols for it.
    The division is not relevant to users of Unicode. On the contrary, to find the Unicode for a desired glyph, like a special math symbol or a letter with a certain modifier, one should ignore the block division and use Google or some other generic search tool -- because one cannot tell which block that symbol has been put into.
    The division is not even useful to font designers. While at some point one would find computer fonts that were limited to one or two specific blocks, that has never been a rule, and fonts are increasingly cutting across the Unicode block boundaries.

Apparently the names above were assigned without the "(Unicode block)" because it was felt that the qualifier was unnecessary, since there was no other page in Wikipedia with that name. But that is not what "unnecessary" means. Most of the names above have a common-sense meaning that has nothing to do with Unicode; so a qualifier is necessary to differentiate them from those common meanings. If you say "Geeometric Patterns", "Number Forms", or "Greek and Coptic" to someone, even to a computer expert, the last thing she will think of is the Unicode block of that name. Initially the moves will create a redirect from each unqualified name to the coresponding qualified name. I will try to replace all uses of the former by the latter. In some cases, like "Tai Viet" or "Mathematical Operators" the redirect is inappropriate or pointless, in which case it will be deleted or redirected to a more appropriate article. Note that, if one will type "Tai Viet" to the search window, the "(Unicode block)" article will be listed anyway as one of the suggested alternatives. There are also half a dozen cases where the Unicode block article was merged into an article about a language, script, or typography article:

These merges should be undone, since the article about the Unicode block is suposed to have a lengthy section that documents the history of the block and the relevant Unicode Consortium publications, that do not belong to the articles above. For reference, the following articles are already named with the qualifier:

Jorge Stolfi (talk) 22:01, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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