Talk:Special characters

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This article was nominated for merging with Character encoding on February 1, 2012. The result of the discussion was to keep the articles separate.

Special Characters

۞ Someone showed some concerned about that page being an indiscriminate collection of information, may be, but this is very usefull to find quickly some interesting characters, the most usefull page I manage to find up to now, on about 25 samples! So I guess some more information about the unicode could help the integration.

Remark : it would be very useful to have pointors on specific group mainly thinking about symbols : emoticons, chess, cards etc... Took me almost 5 minutes to find a smily!

Some more wishes :

more semantic pointors ... arrows, math etc...
an explanation as why many symbols are just empty squares ? local computer handicap ? Just waiting for a future assignation ? Both ? Other ??

Greetings LFR

While it may be useful, it is still not an encyclopedia article. Just being useful is not really enough reason - there are plenty of other websites for such things. If it were to be made into an actual article about the above topics, that would be another matter. -Goldom ‽‽‽ ⁂ 02:32, 18 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, it seems that no other web page give an easy full access, thanks for suppressing this usefull information, lucky I saved it off line !!! --- being strict about definitions of what is an encyclopedy and what is not is not going to be useful when it goes against practical access to information !! --- If I was a bit dummer ans paranoïd I would see that as an attempt to restrict the access to these kind of information !!!

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move. Jafeluv (talk) 20:52, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Special Characters → Special characters –

Per WP:CAPS ("Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization") and WP:TITLE, this is a generic, common term, not a propriety or commercial term, so the article title should be downcased. Lowercase will match the formatting of related article titles. It wasn't upcased in the article text itself. I can't see a good reason to upcase the title. $Tony (talk)$ 06:10, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support per Tony. This one's really obvious. Jenks24 (talk) 16:00, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support —Ruud 20:29, 27 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Is this article even valid?

I'm wondering if this article should exist at all.

It's just a collection of jargon terms, which vary from group to group and particularly vary between uses (programming languages)
It's impossible to cite most of these
The only halfway decent source I know of is the Jargon File (already cited), which itself has no or poor citations for most of this data, and includes a lot of silly names that never were or no longer are in use

This doesn't really seem like encyclopedic content. If it were brought up to WP standards of quality, the list would be HUGE (as you might as well include any character or combination of characters that any programming language would have a special name for, such as -> or !=). --Bigpeteb (talk) 18:13, 6 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I for one would agree. This article is poorly written and poorly sourced. startswithj (talk) 03:47, 2 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The popular name column seems to be sourced from THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.4.3 24 JAN 1991 (under <ASCII> [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] /as'kee/ n. Common slang names for ASCII characters are collected here.) – or another version of that. Search http://jargon-file.org/

The rest is just a Unicode table, sourced from the Unicode Standard. Other than the jargon ("popular name") column this is redundant to List of Unicode characters § Basic Latin. It's just a list of the the 33 ASCII Punctuation & Symbol characters, less the space character. I'll just redirect this to there, and include an external link to the jargon file. Wbm1058 (talk) 04:52, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I just noticed that we have an article on Jargon File. Wbm1058 (talk) 04:58, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I decided that the ASCII article is the more appropriate place to reference the jargon. I added an entry to the "see also" section there:

Jargon File, a glossary of computer programmer slang which includes a list of common slang names for ASCII characters

That has sufficient external links, so I'm not adding any more of those. So just redirecting this to List of Unicode characters, which takes a broader, more modern view of "special characters" beyond those in ASCII, to include the Unicode symbols as well, which is a much larger set of "special characters". Wbm1058 (talk) 13:04, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting: Special characters has been viewed 107790 times in the last 30 days. This article ranked 2210 in traffic on en.wikipedia.org. Per http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Special_characters

Also note that as recently as January 24, it was just a simple slang list. I have to believe that all those viewers were not just looking for esoteric slang names for these characters (but they well may be looking for Unicode special characters that extend beyond the small ASCII subset, or Help:Special characters). – Wbm1058 (talk) 14:50, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Done This is now a redirect. Wbm1058 (talk) 15:17, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]