Commons:Categories for discussion/2021/12/Category:㏗

Category:㏗

Problematic requested move:
Nominator's (user:Beland) rational: this category to be moved to category:pH, because: "Use ASCII characters, not a Unicode compatibility-only character". Date: 2021-12-24

Affected are also:

• Category:㏗ indicator paper
• Category:㏗ indicators
• Category:㏗ measurement
• Category:㏗ meters

Estopedist1 (talk) 12:14, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

I mention that we have also have category:Ph--Estopedist1 (talk) 12:16, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, what's the reason that move would be problematic? I expect most users won't be able to type ㏗ as a single character. -- Beland (talk) 17:46, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

@Beland: these are old categories. One was created in 2007. And no earlier discussions except now in 2021 Estopedist1 (talk) 20:05, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

If you're worried about people following old links to the single-character names, we can just put category redirects to the ASCII names. -- Beland (talk) 22:06, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

@Beland: sounds reasonable. The other question is that maybe category:pH and category:Ph should be reserved to a single DAB page; then we need Category:pH (chemistry) Estopedist1 (talk) 13:01, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

My 0.02 ¤:

• Disambiguation page created at Category:PH.
• I think Category:㏗ should not be renamed because it allows for a simple and robust manner to keep these two letters in the particular improper case (leading lower case "p" and trailing capital "H") it needs to be readily distinguished from other instances of "Ph" and "PH" ({{DISPLAYTITLE:pH}} only works in titles, not in subcat lists and such). Yes, it’s not easily entered via keyboard, but it can be copied and pasted.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 13:35, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

nothing too improper about pH.

taking a science class at primary school might help. done that yet?

🤣 RZuo (talk) 15:14, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

I cannot say I had science classes, as such, in primary school, other the the very basics that are covered within the more general topics. Those do not include pH as such — I had to reach mid school (5th grade in Portugal) to really learn about it. Knowing that the symbol is spelled in an unusual case is the least of it, and I confess that Biochemistry was not a favourite subject during my years as a Biology student at the Lisbon University.

What I did learn in primary school, however, was to write and read (Portuguese), starting with the very basics, the letters of the Latin alpahbet, one of those that displays casing (along with, as I learned later, the Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian alphabets — plus argueably a few others)… but I don’t need to ask back, even if it were relevant: That’s a lesson you decided not to learn.

-- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 01:01, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

• Rename category of all the "㏗" forms. The actual name is composed of two separate letters, not the composed glyph, and I think the difficulty in inputting the composed glyph is a key as well. (Commons:Categories#Category names says we should use what things actually are and use basic English characters where possible). No objetion to leaving the old names as redirects. If this all means that "pH" goes as "pH (chemistry)" due to MW page-name restrictions, that's fine. I think a unified disambiguation of the various capitalizations is reasonable (it's what dewiki seems to have), again to help users find exactly what they want as quickly as possible from what they type, with the current Category:Ph renamed to Category:Ph (digraph) as standard DAB when needed in Category:Latin digraphs. DMacks (talk) 09:58, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

  Agreed about any redirects and a disambiguation page, but I’m sure you meant that, «due to MW page-name restrictions», the proposed new cat name goes instead as "Category:PH (chemistry)" — which is not fine. As said, {{DISPLAYTITLE:pH …}} only works on the page itself, not on categorized pages, parent cat lists, Cat-a-lot, HotCat, et c. — unlike the current cat name you guys want changed, which shows the sought capitalization in a uniquely robust manner. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 13:18, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

  I must insist that the mentioned MW page-name restrictions would render the intended "pH (Chemistry)" as "PH (Chemistry)" and that’s not acceptable: Anyone reading the latter, all caps "PH", will think first of phosphoric acid P-H bonds or some such, and only spelling it out in words (pee-aitch) will give the reader the a-ha sequitur the former, improper cased "pH", does not necessitate.

  As a replacement for the precomposed CJKV character "㏗" this discussion seeks to eliminate (needlessly, in my opinion), a new category name must have the "pH" string elsewhere than in its initial position. (See below for my suggestion to maybe follow the "dB" cat name model.)

  -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 01:23, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

  The alternative disambiguation proposed by @Alfa-ketosav below would solve the ambiguity issue. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 00:47, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

  The issue is not ambiguity, the issue is, and always ever was, capitalization. It’s incredible that two admins already come add to this discussion and neither wanted to face the actual issue. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:35, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

• Rename category This category should be renamed, probably to 'pH (chemistry)' as DMacks mentioned above. In some cases using non-standard (that do not have its eqivalent on typical keyboard) signs are unavoidable or even preferred (minus sign, some diacritics, apostrophe, quotation marks etc.). However, signs like '㏗' here are not meant to be used with Latin text, there is a reason why this sign can be closed in a square – it belongs to the 'CJK Compatibility' Unicode block, i.e. to be used with East Asian scripts only which are written from top to bottom and the sign must fit within a character square. Using it with Latin text is not only incorrect, it also leads to many problems with broadly defined accessibility. Wostr (talk) 20:54, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Wostr says that «this sign can be closed in a square», which is not (how should I put it?)… true, really. The Unicode property "decomposition_type = <square>" is about grid spacing in CJKV typesetting, not about an actual square inked around a symbol (cp. U+20DE). -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:18, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

To quote the Unicode specification ([1]), Square Symbols. Another convention commonly seen in East Asian character sets is the creation of compound symbols by [...] small-sized letters or syllables into a square shape consistent with the typical rendering footprint of a CJK ideograph. A "COMBINING ENCLOSING SQUARE" character is not the only definition of a square. Needless to say, none of that is actually relevant to this requested move. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 00:46, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Indeed not relevant. Only as much as it illustrates how Wostr is talking about things he doesn’t undertstand. And while knowledge about the history of Unicode is irrelevant to this discussion, understanding how Mediawiki treats capitalization of page titles is not. Wostr suggests that «This category should be renamed, probably to 'pH (chemistry)», and you, 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰, as an admin, should be explaining how and why this is a terrible idea, instead of persuing irrelevant tangents. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:30, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Wostr also says that "㏗" is «not meant to be used with Latin text», which is also not really true: This character decomposition leads to "U+0050 U+0048", which are both Latin letters. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:22, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

The decomposition does not change the fact that these composite symbols are encoded for compatibility with Asian and other legacy encodings. [...] The use of these composite symbols is discouraged where their presence is not required by compatibility (i.e. in regular Latin text, for instance). 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 00:46, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

My dear fellow, certainly having to add to Unicode 0.1 all that legacy cruff was a kludge they had to put up with back in 1986 or whatever, but it does come handy for us to have "㏗" as a kludge to circumvent the problem that was saddled on all of us by whover had the “billiant” idea to make Mediawiki titles irrevocably capitalized, in 2001, with no excuse nor reason. That forced capitaliazion means that this is anything but «regular Latin text», for while it’s Latin, it’s certainly not regular. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 21:23, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

support DMacks's.

"pH (chemistry)" for the scale of acidity. "㏗" redirects here.

subcats can omit "(chemistry)" if it's not ambiguous, e.g. pH meters.

"PH" as dab. RZuo (talk) 07:19, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

RZuo opinating about capitalization is a delicious irony. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:19, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

RZup asks for «"PH" as dab.», which was created 11 months ago. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 13:22, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Few of the people voting in favour of renaming even acknowledged, let alone addressed, the problem that caused the choice for this unusual cat name (and nobody did it correctly). The only other option I could support is something akin to Category:Decibel symbol ("dB"), although that would mean split this cat into two nested cats: Category:Acidity symbol ("pH") for the symbol alone, as a subcat of Category:Hydrogenion potency (oslt), itself a subcat of Category:Acidity et c. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 12:28, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

This has been open for 17 months now. But to respond to Tuválkin's specific question, as an example, enwiki uses "pH..." as the starting string for many pages that obviously are handled as "PH..." due to MW limitations. The resulting incorrect rendering can be fixed on individual pages via {{Lowercase title}} but it's true that this does not propagate to their entries on category-listings. To me, that is not nearly strong enough to overcome the fact that using a nonstandard (not just "common but not on standard keyboards") glyph makes it even harder to find categories by searching, and renders differently-weirdly. DMacks (talk) 15:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

I see that only the author of the current, IMO invalid name is against the move. This matter should be resolved by moving the category to the proposed name. I'll do the move if there is no other comments, other than Tuválkin's, to the end of month. Wostr (talk) 20:24, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Said renaming will be promptly undone, of course. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 02:17, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

The result of this discussion is quite clear with only you opposing the change. Said edit war will be promptly reported to the administrators. Wostr (talk) 11:49, 11 August 2023 (UTC)

Don’t try to bully me with your threats, guy. Rather answer the raised questions — or enact the proposed renaming and see how the technical issues I warned about and you all ignore take place and make the renamed category unusable in practice. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 00:18, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

@DMacks: Do you insist on renaming this as Category:pH (chemistry), or did you consider the alternatives I suggested? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 00:25, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

That would be an article, not a category. Alfa-ketosav (talk) 09:17, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

There, typo fixed. Relax. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 02:55, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

I think Category:pH (quantity) should be better, as it doesn't come with "fake categories". Alfa-ketosav (talk) 09:17, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

How would any category name starting with "pH" (spelled like that, as two regular Latin letters) clear the problems mentioned above? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 02:56, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

What does it mean to «come with "fake categories"»? What do you mean with "fake categories"? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 02:59, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

"Fake categories" was my error with the typo I took at face value. There wouldn't be any fake categories. Alfa-ketosav (talk) 09:53, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Using the CJK compatibility character is a very bad idea for this category (making it "fake naming"). There's only a need for this form only in the category about this CJK character only. For all other uses in chemistry, the standard chemical unit, and articles or images of formulas, or instruments about it must use normal Latin letters, and it is the way it will be searched and found by everyone (including in East Asia!). Leave the CJK compatibility character only to the UCS character in Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646, and CJK typography. The title shown for that chemistry topic can be fixed very simply using {{Lowercase}}. "PH" is still a disambiguation category for other uses of two latin "PH" letters in symbols/abbreviations/codes. verdy_p (talk) 17:07, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

You said that «The title shown for that chemistry topic can be fixed very simply using {{Lowercase}}.», but I know that you know that’s not true: Unlike other people in this thread, you do know what the problem is: You know that initial "pH" will become "PH" and that {{Lowercase}} only fixes the issue for title display in the cat page itself, not in subcat listings. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 23:03, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Also note that even the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Wikipedias use standard standard Latin letters in their titles, matching the international chemistry symbol. The compatibility ideograph is an old typography, rarely used. And never used anywhere else (not even scientific publications, and packaging of products which use international standard plain-Latin symbol) ! The only "raison d'être" here in Commons (not justified) is the local MediaWiki restriction on pagenames, and {{Lowercase}} solves that cleanly (for the rest, disambiguation works very well). verdy_p (talk) 17:46, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Note that if the {{Lowercase}} solution is not enough, the other solution is to use "pH" not at the initial position, as suggested above (valid for all measurement unit symbols, but not needed when it is qualified by other terms after it, as there's no ambiguity). verdy_p (talk) 17:52, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the other solution is to use "pH" not at the initial position. Are you accepting that solution? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 23:04, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Final note: all chemical categories for the abbreviation are now named with standard basic Latin letters, according to the international chemistry standards, with the only' exception of the category for the CJK compatibility symbol encoded in the UCS (which is isolated in a subcategory of the standard Latin abbreviated symbol). Disambiguation categories are also fixed, as well as Wikidata entries. Redirects are kept for older names using this symbol. All basic Latin categories use {{Lowercase}} to properly display the abbreviation. This matches the various opinions expressed above and the current practices in all Wikipedias and Wiktionaries. verdy_p (talk) 22:06, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I know that you know that "pH" is a special case, almost unique. Things like the symbol for, say, picovolt or kilonewton, would also qualify, but are seldom found in initial postion and have clear spelled-out forms. The issue at hand can be avoided for, say, "μΩ resistors" by replacing that with "micro-ohm resistors", but that solution doesn’t work for the more frequent cases like, say, "pH strips" — "acidity strips" is not a strict synonym and might not be a good solution. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 23:11, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

the root cause is m:Help:Page_name#Case-sensitivity_of_the_first_character. without addressing this, any solution is just a workaround. RZuo (talk) 05:25, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

This is not a workaround, because case-sensitivity of page names (including categories) in Commons will not change without breaking lot of pages. There's no way in MediaWiki to make exceptions to some pages or categories, and if it is ever implemented, it will require extensive changes in MediaWiki and its extensions to support a new special tag to add in these pages, and to modify many tools to detect these exceptions. The only thing that was added is {{Lowercase}} to change the leading capitalization of displayed titles, but this does not remove the need of disambiguation suffixes where needed; this is general, each time we want to make case distinctions, of categories of individual characters, or for many symbols; this does not affect the main space of Wiktionnary, because case-sensitivity is activated by default; in all wikis, we cannot change this parameter once it has been set for a namespace; the other solution could be to use separate namespaces with different default capitalization rules, but it would complicate a lot linking, templates, and many other externals tools). verdy_p (talk) 09:59, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Conclusion

Verdy p went ahead and replaced "㏗" with "pH" in all affected categories, mostly in initial position. Which results in "PH" everywhere except in page titles, as warned: Subcat listings, Cat-a-Lot, and Hot-Cat. What a great solution! Obviously when encountering the expression "PH chemistry" one immediatly thinks of acidity, instead of puzziling about phosphorus-hydrogen compounds. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 23:21, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

@Estopedist1, Beland, RZuo, DMacks, 1234qwer1234qwer4, Wostr, and Alfa-ketosav: happy with this solution? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 23:25, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

It's OK, I think. Alfa-ketosav (talk) 05:25, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Of course, that was the result of this discussion. Wostr (talk) 07:52, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

As someone who works with Chemistry, you’re telling me that "PH" is an acceptable replacement for "pH", is that it? -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 03:01, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Crickets… -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 13:24, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

No, I do not. Alfa-ketosav (talk) 11:47, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

No (typographically only), but they are equivalent (and the page/category titles are now correctly displayed typographically). If this causes an ambiguity, this is only in isolation, but with any prefix or suffix there's no ambiguity (for linking to the correct page which is also displayed correctly). Also note that CJK symbols are different and must remain isolated as CJK typographic characters, they are not the international standard symbols used by SI which use standard Latin letters! All these CJK compatibility typographic characters are also normally not used in modern Chinese, Japanese, Korean, they were intended to be used as presentation forms for the traditional vertical writing, in a more compact form than using separate Latin letters (in CJK wide forms) stacked vertically. Modern Chinese/Japanese/Korean use standard the SI symbols, with normal (narrow) Latin letters in horizontal writing, and as well use normal digits and ideographs for dates in the horizontal writing mode, not the CJK compatibility characters (which also have several meanings, not necessarily the SI or SI-derived units). All other non-CJK languages also use standard Latin letters for unit symbols and abbreviations. verdy_p (talk) 05:46, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Additional note: the CJK compatibility character "㏗" has a known inconsistency in its compatiblity decomposition in the Unicode database, using the Latin capital letter P instead of the Latin small letter p. This is acknowledged by Unicode itself and this originates from old versions of the standard (but cannot be changed due to stability policy rules for this Unicode character property in the main Unicode character database. This notice is present in the Unicode character charts and Unicode names datafile. Some collation processes that are unaware of this notice may treat "㏗" incorrectly like a variant form of "PH" (with a quaternary minor difference), rather than like a variant form of "pH" (with an incorrect secondary case difference). Unicode CLDR collation treats it correctly as "pH" (ignoring the incorrect UCD decomposition mapping), with no secondary case difference but with a quaternary difference. However, in both cases, there's no primary difference in processes that treat the character ni case-inssitive way (so the case-insensitive initials in Commons category page names is conforming: there's no error at all in Commons; note also that "the CJK compatiblity "㏗" has NO Unicode case-mappings, so titles on Commons using this compatiblity character do not alter it: it remains a CJK compatibility character there, and its case is preserved as is, just like its CJK fullwidth presentation form, so "㏗" is a CJK character, meant for the CJK vertical presentation, different from the standard chemical unit based on standard basic Latin (narrow) letters used in chemical standards and in modern CJK texts with the horizontal presentation). verdy_p (talk) 00:57, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

I have first met your penchant for Gish-galloping online almost 30 years ago now. It’s oddly reassuring it has not changed, sad as it also is. -- Tuválkin ✉ ✇ 13:43, 31 July 2024 (UTC)