Lack of them on TALK pages and available for edit summaries, leads to all kinds of communications-misunderstandings and unnecessary hurt feelings and drama.

Or was that the point?

It's almost as though communicational disfunction was PLANNED.

But I could be wrong. Was putting them in discussed somewhere and voted on? Or voted down? Would be interested in reading the discussion on that!

I don't know if they have been discussed/voted upon.

Interesting theory you posit, that emoticons can somehow be better than simply just text in communicating underlying intentionality. It seems it could very well be.

There is an extension, at least partially (sans edit summaries?) for this purpose, which you and others may or may not be aware.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Emoticons

I didn't know about that. Do you know of any MediaWiki-using site that has availed themselves of this patch?

If MediaWiki software was originally written to not support emoticons (how stupid is that, considering it's a software package INTENDED for collaboration? ) then that may explain why WP started out without it. But it doesn't explain why, after all this time, they haven't added it, per the program patch you link. They have plenty of programmers, paid and volunteer.

This feature lack on MediaWiki software also explains why Encyclopedia Dramatica, of all places, also has no emoticons. BBS systems all have them, but Wikified systems that run with MediaWiki don't.

Of course, as a mere user of MediaWiki sites, all this does me no good at all to know. I can only opine that the people who developed the software, and who now make it available for projects, have completely missed the boat on this issue.

Which is not surprising, because they are all programmer geeks. What else should we expect?

But programmer geeks meet real world eventually. For instance, has Novell picked up the wiki-emoticon patch for any of its Wiki-projects?

Wikipedia has policy of NPA

So...?

So maybe Mr. Quanta has heard about our fabulous "One-Liner Contributors" group and wants to join!

As for me, I used to avoid emoticons like the plague. I mean, I absolutely hated them at first - they just seemed so, I dunno... dumb. But eventually I had to admit, they do help reduce the likelihood of misunderstandings, some of which can be quite time-consuming and stressful.

But if I know Wikipedians as well as I think I do, they'll reject the idea of allowing easy insertion of emoticons on talk pages completely - after all, they might serve to "visually distract" or "disrupt the narrative flow of discussion," not to mention "increase bandwidth usage due to the additional image downloads."

Well actually we've got plenty of them [1] which people do use manually with little difficulty, e.g. [[Image:Frowny.svg|15px|]] for , but having them generate automatically from certain letter/symbol patterns would create too many false positives, plus WP would not want to support the conclusion that it is some kind of social gnetwerking site.

See-- I couldn't tell if your last thought was sarcastic or not.

Anyway, social kissing-up is the function of barnstars. The function of emoticons is far less like social-grooming than awards are. Emoticons merely lubricate civil disagreement and debate, just as smiles and salutes do in real life. They are badly needed in TALK space.

Or would you rather have barfights and bouncers just because somebody didn't smile when they called somebody else a bad name?

Oh, and as to the false positives from text-- clearly there are symbols which shouldn't come up as combos of others stuff too often? The bracket by semicolons we do here is pretty good. It's at least as good as the markup brackets << and [[ used by HTML and PHP (or whatever MediaWiki is).

The "not gnetworking" (ha! ha!) argument doesn't work because people still use the old version text smileys, or just bracket a response like I did at the beginning of the sentence. :~)

You might note that I use an alut or whatever the thingy is called as a nose between mouth and eyes, which means I don't get caught out in environments where icons are pre-loaded, since I tend to use colons, semi-colons, brackets and all sorts of other punctuations. I think it also makes it look more like a face... one of a boxer or other contact sports, with a broken nose. Or Chris Isaak.

No matter, people are using the text version - and any site scraping WP where emoticons are installed will display it.

Wikipedia has a policy of bolding the first mention of the article subject in the article body.

Hah?.....

I installed it on Wikademia just for giggles -> http://wikademia.org/MediaWiki_talk:Emoticons

Only one works right now. This one: (well, ~ equivalent)

Anyone know of good emoticon sets that could be uploaded to Commons and then be used on Wikademia... as in, GFDL compatible?

Is WR's emoticon set licensed under GFDL like I presume the code of this board is? (...or maybe not )

Or at least GPL...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Smilies

Some are traceable to open-source projects, some are so simple they were probably drawn in a few minutes in inkscape by the uploader, some probably aren't really free; use your own judgement. Probably the largest coherent-looking set of emoticons you can get from that is about eight.

lol ya. out of the 400 I found some reasonable ones

i started to make the set at http://wikademia.org/Scratch_11