Talk:Star (glyph)

????

Why is ߷ called fidget spinner? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fwaff (talk • contribs) 22:10, 7 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I guess because of visual similarity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 19:40, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment

I get a lot of question marks on this page in Mozilla Firefox. I also get error boxes in IE.

71.81.46.119 07:13, 27 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This article contains special characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.

The {{SpecialChars}} template, displayed here and in the article, explains why you get those problems. --DThomsen8 (talk) 01:26, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's only half the answer though. Most of our readers won't have Bamum or Rejang support, so we really should be using images for those. (For the time being. As soon as Bamum / Rejang support is common, or Wikipedia gets a way to add images for a codepoint on a page or something, they should be changed back to actual characters.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 19:45, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Is asterisk a "star"?

Hi. From the definition, asterisk seems to belong to stars, but it's not included in the list. Please clarify it in the article page. Thanks beforehand.--Teika kazura (talk) 07:13, 10 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it does. I think the reason it hasn't been included yet is because depending on the font it can have either five or six (or even seven or eight!) points. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 19:55, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The same applies to U FF0A which is currently listed under five points, but which can have six points in some fonts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 20:10, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

And to U 204E. I get the impression that not much care has been put in the compilation of this list.

And I found two more: U 2217 & U 20F0. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 16:35, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

✨

✨ redirects here, but that symbol doesn't appear to be on the page. Whyfor? --50.183.13.223 (talk) 08:28, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is that character? —Tamfang (talk) 19:29, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There reads: "⁕" redirects here. For other uses, see ⁕ (disambiguation).

And when I clicked to see, there reads, ⁕ is the Unicode character U 2055 flower punctuation mark, one of several star glyphs. And strangely, the tab title bar shows the character, while it does appear anywhere else. 212.50.203.198 (talk) 17:49, 4 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I just noticed that the symbol in question is a star with two smaller stars on its right side (it can be seen by selecting it and choosing search). I could not find any additional info about it. 212.50.203.198 (talk) 18:00, 4 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is the Unicode character U 2728 ("SPARKLES"). By smartphones it is displayed in color like emojis. Should sparkles be counted as stars? --94.186.141.156 (talk) 09:53, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know, I guess it's subjective. But for people who don't count sparkles as stars, an entry for ✨ wouldn't really be in the way, whereas people who do might be inconvenienced if it isn't present. Furthermore, if something redirects to another page, that page should almost always mention it, because it can be really frustrating if you enter something in the search box, you get redirected and start reading the page and then it turns out the thing you were looking for isn't even mentioned. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 20:06, 23 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

arabic star vs asterisk

There is now an asterisk-like symbol listed, the arabic star. It is listed in "Five points" section, with name "Arabic star (5, 6 or 8 points)", though the symbols shown have 8 points. Strange is that there are two characters which seem exactly identical to me. I tried to compare them in my word processor, but they appeared as blocks. 82.141.117.187 (talk) 19:42, 26 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In 2016 the following comment was added:

(summary: add hidden comment regarding otherwise mysteriously duplicated star; this was added in 2005 to demonstrate non-unicode font use of the symbol, unsure if worth keeping)

This is however a misunderstanding of what was going on. You see, the wiki software had been using UTF-8 internally for months, so there was no such thing as non-Unicode text on Wikipedia. (Indeed, in 2005 it's very unlikely that the editor was using a browser that didn't use Unicode internally.) What was really going on is that at the time Wikipedia still had a Unicode CSS class that applied a list of fallback fonts to prevent toufu. Without the CSS class, most users would see the character rendered using Arial, with the class most users would see the character rendered using Arial Unicode MS. In Arial, it has eight leaves, in Arial Unicode MS it has six spokes.

I'd argue they're both wrong, as even in Unicode 14.0 it's still called ‘ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR’ and although its variability is noted, there's no erratum anywhere to explain why ‘five pointed’ should no longer be prescriptive. In ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N3198R they write: ‘The shape of some of the glyphs in our code charts and/or in common fonts differs from the shapes shown in this table: U 066D ARABIC STAR is sometimes implemented in Arabic fonts with a shape quite different than the one in our code charts [which show five points], “[glyph with eight leaves]”.’ It's nowhere explained why there's no value judgement or explanation in the text, or why it's called ‘ARABIC STAR’ in the text even though it was properly called ‘ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR’ from all the way back when it was added in Unicode 1.1, in accordance with the relevant Unicode stability policy, but I suspect it's because the publishers of the fonts in question had members on the committee. For what it's worth, Microsoft Sans Serif shows a glyph that's close to the one in the 1.1 standard.

Now, to get back to the question at hand, from 2011 onwards all Unicode-related fixes were removed, a move which was prompted by a broad wave of all kinds of organisations dropping support for IE6 if I recall correctly. So nowadays, the CSS class Unicode no longer does anything and the two instances of this character appear identical. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 15:12, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Terrible use of space

This article only shows four characters at a time, but most of the screen is empty space. 92.67.227.181 (talk) 16:08, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dubious entries

This article contains some dubious entries. Take for example ‘Latin capital letter Y’. Nobody in their right mind would call that a star, it isn't meant to depict one (it's a mace) and the triskelion article doesn't mention the letter either. 92.67.227.181 (talk) 16:28, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

߷ symbolizes three stones which would hold a cooking pot over a flame. Doesn't look like a star, doesn't depict a star, why is it here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 17:39, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree to both of the above and have deleted. If anybody seriously considers these to be stars, please produce a reliable source that says so. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 22:02, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How do you feel about X, x, ×, & ᐩ? To me these just look like two crossing lines, not like four lines radiating from a single point. Contrast them with ✦, ✧ & ✨ where there are clearly four points emanating from a centre. Do you understand what I mean? Or 🟀, 🟁, 🟂 & 🟃 which are all clearly three-pointed stars and not even in the article. Or how about these four-pointed ones: ⯌, ⯍, ⯎, ⯏, 🟄, 🟅, 🟆, 🟇, 🟈? I'm on the fence about this one: ⊹, what do you think? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.67.227.181 (talk) 15:53, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

X, x, ×, & ᐩ are definitely not stars, so I will delete. OTH, ⯌, ⯍, ⯎, ⯏, 🟄, 🟅, 🟆, 🟇, 🟈 all seem good enough to stay: I err on the side of being generous.

Why not fix any other issues yourself? You don't need to be registered but you might find it more convenient to have an account (you don't need to (and probably should not) use your real name). If you make a mistake, don't worry, it is easy to go undo a change. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:02, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

>Why not fix any other issues yourself?

I cannot pretend to be an expert on what is and isn't a star, so I was just seeking a second opinion. I will gladly make the changes myself, but I'll not create an account. It isn't any more convenient and I found out the hard way that it attracts the wrong kind of attention from Wikipedia's toxic community. 92.67.227.181 (talk) 17:53, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

⛯ and ☼

This is a map symbol for lighthouses. Not literally a star, but it kind of looks like one and it does depict a brightly shining object. But after my plea above to remove dubious entries, I cannot very well add it unless someone else agrees that ⛯ belongs here.

The sun ☼ though is literally a star, I'll put it on my list of symbols to add when I have time. 92.67.227.181 (talk) 16:47, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The list is an eclectic collection of reasonably star-shaped symbols. The lighthouse symbol is one such (but X and are too far outside a reasonable definition). Go ahead.

btw, I agree that the symbols were too big but 150% is too small for the tiny ones. Can you try 200%? [If you had an account, you'd get a sandbox where you could try it out first, to see how it looks on mobile as well as desktop). --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:56, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Arabic five-pointed star

If we are to say "in some fonts, it has a different number", then the footnote needs to pre-empt the obvious questions: which? how many? John Maynard Friedman (talk) 17:50, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]