Too late now — it’s become an annually refreshed collection of fun fashionable clip art instead of an impartial repository of humankind’s symbols.
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.
/s
Refs: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html
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?
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Constraints are sometimes good. It's great to see how something like the Eggplant & Peach emoji got hijacked and used as a sexual reference.
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.
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.
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.