File talk:Linguistic Barnstar.png

Random comments

This is a great image, and I just used it to make The Linguistic Barnstar on English Wikipedia. I did have some thoughts, though, and figured maybe I could give some constructive criticism if anyone is around and wants to improve it.

1. Putting the Roman alphabetic characters in the center seems a bit anglo-centric. Then again, whatever goes in the center would be something-centric (even if it were just a blank syntax tree or something, that would be chomsky-centric); maybe things can be organized around the star rather than right in the middle? Or, if there's something suitably "neutral/universal" enough to go in the center, that could be good too. (Then again, just to play devil's advocate with myself...I suppose the Roman alphabet is probably the most widely-used one when making up new orthographies, plus it's the basis for IPA.)
2. Similar note.... of the characters on the star's "points", 3/5 of them are East Asian (there's hanzi, hangul, and kanji)...one is Arabic and the one on the lower right I'm not sure about.
3. This is not something that necessarily needs to, or should, be done on this image, but just something to think about...is there anything else that's linguistic-y, other than orthographic characters, that would be easy to illustrate on a barnstar? For example, syntax trees, spectograms, waveforms...

Rjanag (talk) 21:36, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion

The overall image would be much more aesthetically pleasing if the characters were just rotated into the whitespace and the leftmost one was made slightly bolder to be consistent with the rest. Furthermore, the image as it is makes the Japanese character appear incorrectly due to the shading of the star (i.e., it's topmost bar is "invisible").

Peace and Passion (talk) 02:35, 26 August 2009 (UTC)