Category talk:Symbols

The description of this category says that it should include (especially!) mathematical and scientific symbols. However, I just found (rather was reminded of) an old discussion which seems to say that these symbols are to be avoided - are there now a new consensus in this issue? \Mike 16:42, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't seem to interpret that conversation the same way you do, I guess. I don't think I'm about to go out of my way to enter a whole bunch of them. But as long as their unicode characters don't cause problems, I can see why people might find it useful to have these entries. Should this question move to the Beer Parlor? --Connel MacKenzie 18:10, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

This edit, I guess, is the reason why I interpreted it the way I did... \Mike 18:23, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Symbol versus non-abbreviation codes

It would seem that codes for concepts that are alphanumeric but that are not abbreviations according to the formal definition of being "an abbreviated form of the word/phrase" do not have a home presently. I created Category:Stock symbols for companies recently as a subcategory of Category:Symbols but have moved it under Category:Abbreviations owing to the description associated with Category:Symbols. One could also question for the same reason the placement of Category:Symbols for chemical elements, which are all alphabetic but could not in some cases be called abbreviations unless the term is expanded to include cross-language references; for instance Pb is an abbreviation for the Latin "plumbum" but not for the English "lead". Thoughts? Ceyockey 01:35, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Emoticons

I was thinking about Emoticons being part of the 'symbol' category of abbreviations, but surely they're closer to punctuation than abbreviation?

When people use them, it's not to condense a long word or phrase onto a single string and there's no direct substitute for them that doesn't involve rewording the text around them (You can't just dump "wink" or "he said smilingly" at the end of a sentence without it becoming improper or awkward English, or referring to yourself in the third person - which, as all civilised people know, is the 3rd sign of madness after hairy palms and not washing).

I think Emoticons are used as a form of expression, often to put written words into a context that can't be relayed reliably without the inflections of speech - just like exclamation marks or question marks,only more expressive so that irony, sarcasm, uncontrollable excitement or anger can be expressed easily without the need for articulating yourself properly. — This unsigned comment was added by 81.179.114.54 (talk).

Sorting

This category really needs to be cleaned up using sortkeys (so most entries won't get listed as single entries under themselves, which is pretty useless from a reader's perspective). But how should it be done? - dcljr 23:41, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

langcode

Shouldn't subcategories to other languages in this category, like Finnish or Swedish, be sorted by their respective language code (fi:, sv:) rather than their entire language name, to coincide with other categories? /Natox 11:57, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Category:Symbols and Category:All symbols

What is the difference between Category:Symbols and Category:All symbols? Judging from the current contents, the former is father a category for symbol names and currency codes while the latter is for symbol characters. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 05:22, 2 September 2013 (UTC)