Manatee emoji?

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Wed Nov 23 10:59:57 CST 2016


Well, I'd suggest "more than one" as the lower limit since change.org counts the original person as #1 and Unicode'd probably want at least one other person to agree with them ;-)

If I knew how to draw a Manatee glyph, I'd propose it for them ;0)  

However preemptively proposing this emoji wouldn't help address their concern of "raising awareness."  Their change.org petition is probably doing at least as much to raise awareness as encoding an emoji without any hubbub would be.  To help raise the most awareness, Unicode should probably deny it a few times so that they can raise awareness even more.  (I'm joking about the last in case that wasn't obvious).  But, more seriously, it's a fair point and we shouldn't use their Manatee proposal to try to preemptively encode emoji for other similar scenarios.  Let them petition for each one.

*I* personally would find a Manatee emoji more useful than many of the other ones that are already encoded.  That said, I've never missed having it in the repertoire (until now).

Encoding glyphs for all fauna (& flora) obviously can't happen though.  I wonder where the line is?  Waiting for petitions seems like a reasonable gating factor, at least until that proves problematic somehow.

-Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] On Behalf Of Ken Whistler
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2016 8:40 AM
To: James Kass <jameskasskrv at gmail.com>
Cc: unicode at unicode.org
Subject: Re: Manatee emoji?

James,


On 11/23/2016 7:15 AM, James Kass wrote:
> How many signatures on a petition would be needed before Unicode would 
> consider adding a non-existent character to the repertoire?

I would say somewhat more than zero (which could hardly be considered a
petition) and less than 7,466,363,069 (current estimate of the world population).

BTW, from the selection factors page:

http://www.unicode.org/emoji/selection.html#Selection_Factors_Requested

"Petitions are only considered as possible indications of potential frequency of usage, among the other selection factors."

BTW, U+1F984 UNICORN FACE was a "non-existent character" for a non-existent animal before it made the selection review cut and was actually encoded as a new emoji. That doesn't mean, a priori, that it was a bad choice to encode. Nor did the existence or non-existence of a petition to encode this particular non-existent animal as an emoji character make much difference, anyway.

--Ken




More information about the Unicode mailing list