Associação da WMF com Unicode Consortium
A Fundação Wikimédia tornou-se um dos mais de 30 membros organizacionais de Unicode Consortium. Esta adesão é por um período de 1 ano. Isto permite-nos estar mais cientes dos problemas sobre o suporte de idiomas e scripts que são relevantes para os nossos projetos e ferramentas. Através desta relação nós também poderemos atuar como uma voz de ligação entre o nosso movimento e o Consórcio. This membership is renewed annually. It allows us to be better aware of issues about language support and scripts which are relevant for our projects and tools. Through this relationship we also will be able to act as a connecting voice between our movement and the Consortium.
Sobre Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded in 1991, dedicated to developing and maintaining universal and open source character encoding standards. Their work goes beyond character encoding to include character properties, algorithms, language and data for internationalization, and software libraries to support these standards. This work is done by corporations, governments, research and educational institutions, industry groups and associations, and individuals who are leaders in internationalization, fonts, rendering, and all aspects of text processing. The Wikimedia Foundation had not held a membership with the Consortium prior to March 2024, but has participated in Unicode projects, discussion forums, and conferences in the past.
Benefícios da nossa afiliação =
As an associate level member, we hope to establish increased connections with the Consortium and represent Wikimedia's needs with clarity and planning. For the coming year we intend to do the following:
- Advocate for language support issues important to our work and languages
- Participate in relevant Unicode discussions
- Stay informed about upcoming changes within Unicode projects
- Contribute to conversations on character encoding and language support
Grupo de coordenação
Within the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology department, a coordination group serves as the primary point of contact for the Unicode membership.
The current 2026 group coordinates the Language Onboarding and Development initiative and has been involved in discussions with past coordination group members around the Jawi Hamza proposal for potential Unicode involvement. (T374782)
This group would like to establish a conversation space for communities' insights and experiences with language issues on Wikimedia projects that are directly connected to Unicode standards or projects. To do so, we would like to invite you to connect with us on the talk page. We will collaboratively review the issues and, where appropriate, bring them to the attention of the Unicode Consortium. Similarly we will offer insights from discussions with the Consortium. Going forward we would like to learn better how we can improve this arrangement for more voices from the communities to join the discussions on this page as well as in forums with the Consortium.
Current Members (Jan 2026 –)
Membros
Unicode-related topics under exploration
These topics represent early-stage investigations and community discussions for 2026. Not all items are formal Unicode proposals or active submissions.
| Topic | Summary | Current status | Last updated | Discussion notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vietnamese diacritics ambiguity | Community initially proposed a new codepoint for the Vietnamese tilde, but Unicode raised conflicts with Portuguese usage where the same diacritic is already misencoded as Spanish, prioritizing preservation of Portuguese text without ambiguity.
Across three proposals (L2/24-111, L2/25-066, L2/25-130), there was no agreement on which existing codepoint to annotate, and Unicode instead annotated a different diacritic in Unicode 17.0 that the community finds problematic in mixed-language use cases. |
Community is collecting evidence that the Vietnamese language community is largely not using the committee’s annotation. Based on this, they plan to return with a new proposal. | May 2026 | Meeting notes |
| SignWriting and sign languages | Although SignWriting was approved in Unicode in 2013, implementation issues followed, including font and character model mismatches. Ongoing concerns remain that the official model does not preserve symbol identity, and attempts to align with Unicode did not resolve key design differences about how signs should be represented.
It also appears that SignWriting support might be causing rendering or page-breaking issues in Incubator:Test_wikis_of_sign_languages. A keyboard for sign writing also exists, developed by User:Yair rand. |
Re-engagement with Unicode is considered high effort with limited expected gain at this stage. | May 2026 | Meeting notes |
| Jawi Hamza support | Community wants to propose a new Unicode character for Jawi Malay (“Three-Quarter Hamza”) because the current workaround is problematic. Editors are currently using the standard Arabic Hamza (ء) plus CSS/HTML tricks to make it look correct, but this breaks in places that require plain text (like Wikidata).
Unicode previously rejected the idea of adding a separate character, suggesting instead to reuse an existing one (Kazakh HIGH HAMZA) and rely on fonts or styling. The community disagrees because that solution is not reliable or consistent across systems. |
New Proposal was developed in collaboration with a WMF staff member and the Malay Wikimedia community. It is currently stalled while the community gathers stronger real-world evidence to support re-submission. | May 2026 | T374782 |
Expetativas
While we're excited about this opportunity, we cannot guarantee that the Consortium will address all issues or prioritise them faster than usual. The membership is renewed annually, contingent on it proving impactful and viable in supporting community and project needs.
We look forward to leveraging this membership to improve language support in our products and to represent our community's needs in the broader Unicode ecosystem.