Wikipedia:WikiProject Emoji

WikiProject Emoji is a Wikipedia community project for discussing and developing Wikipedia's policy and best practices relating to the use of emojis. Issues relating to emojis and Wikipedia include:

When readers visit Wikipedia articles which include emojis, what emoji set should Wikipedia display?
What is the Wikipedia best practice recommendation on the use of emojis in internal talk page discussions?
How do we align English Wikipedia resources related to emojis with resources in Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Meta-Wiki?

About emojis

Example places Wikipedia articles which display emojis include the following:

Display of emoji in English Wikipedia

Currently when anyone accesses a Wikipedia publication which includes an emoji, that person will view the emoji set by the configuration of their own device and software. For example, if a reader is using an Apple device, then by default that reader will see the Apple emojis in Wikipedia. However if no emoji set is present then the emoji will appear as REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, �.

The Wikipedia community has a choice: should Wikipedia by default present the emoji from the user's own device settings, or should Wikipedia, by default, present an emoji set recommended by the Wikipedia community? How should the Wikipedia community make a policy decision?

Practice to present, 2020

Currently on Wikipedia when emoji are displayed we add the following notice:

This notice is only due to the fact that Wikipedia relies on the user’s system to present all font rendering, whether it’s a desktop, mobile, or even a print out. For content that may not be rendered correctly images are served alongside what should be presented. However if Wikipedia was to serve font files for these emoji then they would be compatible with all devices. The benefits of fonts rather than images are numerous [many sources]. Additionally screen readers automatically read the name of the emoji, negating the time needed to annotate images with alt text.

Open emoji set from Wikimedia Commons?

If Wikipedia were to have a native emoji set, then we would host that emoji set in Wikimedia Commons. The emoji set would have to comply with Wikimedia Commons licensing terms, meaning that it would need to be free media. Also the Wikimedia community would need to make an editorial decision about which emoji set to use.

Free media emoji sets

To choose an emoji set for Wikipedia there are many considerations. Firstly we need to ensure that the emoji set used complies with the standard wikipedia license, CC BY SA 3.0. These are the emoji licences that can be readily found.

Openmoji	CC BY SA 4.0
Joypixels EmojiOne	CC BY SA 4.0
Twemoji	CC BY 4.0
Microsoft Segoe Color Emoji	Can’t redistribute
Google Noto Emoji	Apache 2.0

As none of the emojis are licensed under a public domain license, there would need to be attribution on the pages which feature emojis. This would break precedent, as all attribution given is for the page text and not given to any package or otherwise.

Create or develop a Wikimedia emoji set

If no emoji set can be picked as attribution shouldn’t be required, the only solution is creating an open, public domain emoji set. There are already projects such as commons:SMirC and commons:Category:Smilies.

After this project is stable, I would recommend that we remove all notices of the form shown above and change the icon we represent emoji as with our smiling face emoji.