Talk:Heart (symbol)

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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. This article has been tagged since January 2007.

Religious works aren't literature, at least to the people who believe in the religion. Since the article discusses the Bible extensively, "Heart in literature" is an inherently POV title. "Heart as a metaphor" or "Heart (metaphor)" would be more neutral. It's an easy mistake :). 68.81.231.127 17:12, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I didn't write this article, I just moved it from an inappropriate location. I don't view the title of this article as a mistake, simply a choice of words of the original author. My interpretation of the word "literature" is broader than only fiction or works of men. The Bible is also full of references to "man" and "men", yet most religious scholars do not interpet this as narrowly as your interpretation of 'literature' above. -DanD

It's a mistake. If it can be misconstrued, the title needs to be changed. We need to be as careful about implicit bias in titles as we are in categories: "Categories appear without annotations, so be careful of NPOV when creating or filling categories. Unless it is self-evident and uncontroversial that something belongs in a category, it should not be put into a category." (Wikipedia:Categorization). It's the same thing here. Anyway, "metaphor" is more accurate. 68.81.231.127 01:41, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I like the images and info provided here, but this article needs some better organization, formatting, wording, and a little expansion, as well as some corrections ("In the Bible, and in much later literature, the heart is used as a metaphor to refer to the moral core of a human being including the intellect and not just the emotions" - so the heart was never used as a metaphor for this prior to the Bible?!, the Bible is technically mythology, not "literature," etc.). -Silence 08:17, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sources?

A recent Slate article [1] makes no mention of several sources for the symbol, such as cattle, Sumerian cuneform for "woman" - and its resemblance to buttock, vulva, etc. Maybe the Slate writer didn't investigate enough, but does anyone know a source for this info?--Chinawhitecotton 20:12, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unicode image

I don't see the image of the unicode heart in Firefox. While this may be just my computer, it's quite likely that a large proportion of browsers can't see the image (indeed, as the article itself states), and so maybe it ought to be replaced with an actual image? — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 17:21, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

It's not just your computer, it's a very significant percentage of computers. The code absolutely needs to go, just like any other nonstandard text character codes in any Wikipedia articles. DreamGuy 19:39, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

I've got the same issue - also running Firefox, on Mac OS X. The odd bit is that while the unicode heart appears as a long vertical line on the page, it appears just fine in the talk page: ♥

[edit] Absolute nonsense edit comment and condescending comment

Silence wrote this: "(get a new browser? codes very much like these are used very regularly throughout tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles, to no ill effect. you're just the 1 user out of 10,000 who can't see the pics.)" This is a mixture of utter clueless and arrogance that is quite disturbing. The fact o the matter is it's not at all close to only 1 out of 10,000 users that have a problem, and the main point is that there is no encyclopedic reason to be using such system-specific extended character set codes when they are completely unnecessary. All you nmeed to do is get a REAL GRAPHIC demonstrating the pic. This computer code shorthand is sloppy, noncompliant with cross system standards, and just downright pathetic. There is no reason whatsoever to tell people on other systems that they are somehow second class citizens here and try to paint them as being insignificant and ignorant when in fact it's the people using the botched up code who are ignorant. DreamGuy 12:36, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

And yet more ridiculous edit comments... Zetawolf ignores very clear problems described in my edit comments, blind reverts everything, and then says to taje it to the talk page, which, tah dah, is already here and already mentioned but ignored by Silence and Zetawolf. It's clear both of them are not editing following Wikipedia policies. They claim that I shouldn;t start a revert war, when they have taken no steps at all to justify their actions or to justify inclusion of nonstandard code on the page itself and are just blindly reverting... I have clearly explained the problems here and in edit comments, so the problem obviously lies with the two editors blindly reverting every change and ignoring every problem. DreamGuy 19:36, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia uses Unicode extensively in a number of articles, including any article using Greek symbols (Alpha, for example), Japanese characters, or IPA pronunciation. The ♥ symbol is not system-specific - it's part of the HTML standard, and my unmodified Windows 2000 install can view it just fine. I think you're either using an unsupported browser, or you've removed some symbol fonts. Zetawoof^(ζ) 21:36, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

"Unsupported browsers" are, unfortunately, still in significant use. Not everybody uses Windows XP (and has a computer manufactured since 2002) or uses Windows 2000 (and has a "business" computer manufactured since 2000); many users of the World Wide Web still use computers that came with the Windows 98 or Windows Millennium Edition operating system, which has much less support for Unicode fonts. Can anybody test this page on Windows 98 or ME and report what happens? Besides, on which page does English Wikipedia define which browsers it supports? --Damian Yerrick (☎) 21:08, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Given that Microsoft will be ending support for Windows 98 and ME in July, though, does Wikipedia really need to take steps to support them? Zetawoof^(ζ) 21:36, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

But what does a single PNG of the ♥ symbol hurt? I'm pretty sure that browsers for some handheld systems cannot handle the entire Unicode BMP but can handle small PNG images. Even if a web browser supports a character, if the system cannot provide a glyph for the character, all you get is a □. --Damian Yerrick (☎) 22:03, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

It screws up line spacing if the bitmap isn't the right size - which is system- and user-dependent. Zetawoof^(ζ) 23:11, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Zetawoof:

1. Tell that to the major contributors to the article about the artist formerly known as .
2. Images that are one em tall do not screw up line spacing. The fact that MediaWiki does not allow image sizes to be specified in ems is a MediaWiki limitation, which should be reported in Bugzilla.
3. I was referring primarily to the big red ♥ in "As icon", which could be turned into a PNG thumbnail at right without hurting much of the flow of the article.

--Damian Yerrick (☎) 23:42, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

The line spacing on that article is actually screwed up badly on my machine - I can provide a screenshot, if you want. In any case, that article uses an image because no glyph is available - if there were a widely available Unicode codepoint for the article would probably use that. An image for the large heart would be perfectly acceptable, though - that one's being used as an image, not a symbol, which could be fixed without wrecking text flow. Zetawoof^(ζ) 00:07, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

The bigger issue, though, is that you're repeatedly deleting an entire section of the article ("I ♥") without justification, and reverting unrelated edits in other parts of the article. This isn't OK, and is the primary reason we're reverting you. You'll have to provide some sort of good reason this section doesn't belong before anyone's willing to let your edit stand. Zetawoof^(ζ) 20:40, 19 April 2006 (UTC)