Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems

Naming consistency

archived at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (writing systems)

Good article reassessment for Sinhala script

Sinhala script has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk)

Requested move at Talk:G-caron#Requested move 31 December 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:G-caron#Requested move 31 December 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. —usernamekiran (talk) 10:42, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

Origin of the alphabet

In a lot of articles (Proto-Sinaitic script, History of the alphabet#Semitic alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Aleph#Origin, Bet (letter)#Origin, Gimel, Dalet, He (letter)#Origins, Waw (letter)#Origin, etc.), the letters of our alphabet are claimed to be derived from hieroglyphs. This, however, is a minority view the contenders of which contradict each other in the details. Therefore an encyclopedia should not represent this as a fact, as we currently do in all these articles. Please join the discussion at Talk:Proto-Sinaitic script#A complete misrepresentation of the history of writing so we can achieve a consensus before changing all these articles. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 14:00, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Emphasis marks

I created a discussion at WikiProject Linguistics about the article emphasis mark that is possibly relevant to editors of this project. Feel free to participate if you wish. ★Trekker (talk) 12:03, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Notability of individual letters

In past AfDs launched by me, disagreements have arisen about notability of letters. Some editors claimed that letters are inherently notable under WP:5P1 (User:Cyclopia). I argued that WP:GNG applies to letters. What is your opinion on this matter?

I think there also were disagreements on what counts as WP:SIGCOV. I would suggest (to avoid misunderstandings: I haven't discussed this on-wiki before.) that letters, for which only the following information is available from reliable sources, should have their articles merged into a letters list (i.e. into an appropriate section of the article about the alphabet/orthography, or a specialized list, like List of Cyrillic letters):

• existence of the letter
• languages/orthographies/scripts, in which the letter is used
• Unicode encoding
• pronunciation, if sufficiently trivial (no firm criterion, but e.g. esh has a very trivial pronunciation, while yat has an extremely nontrivial one)
• a short piece of trivia that would fit into a trivia (or notes) column in a letters list

What do you think about these points? Your ideas are welcome.

Pinging editors who have participated in more than one of the AfDs launched by me: @Kepler-1229b, Eluchil404, Anonrfjwhuikdzz, and Stockhausenfan.

—Janhrach (talk) 15:30, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

Letters surely aren't inherently notable, but given every letter in any alphabet that descends from Proto-Sinaitic has at least a story to tell of its lineal descent, both graphically as well as functionally in the corresponding orthography, that pushes us safely into independent articles being best for many alphabets at least. For esh as a borderline example, the only thing that makes me think not to fold it into another article is that it was borrowed between more than one phonetic alphabet. Remsense ‥ 论 15:36, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

• WP:SIGCOV says: 'Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.' My (preliminary) opinion is that mentions of a letter in an educational resource cannot (usually) be trivial, since they must be sufficient for people to learn how to use the alphabets in question. However, learning materials will rarely have more information than that which is listed here on any specific letter, so it seems to me that it follows that we don't need more than that for these letters to meet WP:SIGCOV. I guess the discussion is primarily about WP:NOPAGE, but I will say that I personally find articles about individual letters to be very useful. Of course WP:ILIKEIT, but I'm just mentioning that to provide the background that these aren't pages that nobody wants which are just being prevented from deletion by bureaucracy. Stockhausenfan (talk) 15:49, 4 May 2025 (UTC)
  • Another point is that often these kinds of articles might look non-notable when in fact there are relevant sources, only they are not in English and do not mention the letter in the title, making them hard to search for. A case in point is the article Tje, which might look hopeless at first sight but in fact this paper quite clearly meets WP:SIGCOV. Stockhausenfan (talk) 16:15, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

I agree with @Stockhausenfan above. I have used this argument in most or all of the AfDs I participated in related to this topic. Many of the articles are unsourced, making them seem as if they were not notable. In reality, there are many learning materials created for them, such as alphabet books. This is the case for most of the old Abkhaz letters, for example. 🪐Kepler-1229b | talk | contribs🪐 18:00, 4 May 2025 (UTC)