The buzz around the toobz this week involves the editing of Wikipedia entries, with conservatives claiming that it’s the left at fault, while liberals are countering that it’s right wing outfits like Fox News who are really to blame. There’s a web site that scans for IP numbers of folks who are submitting Wiki edits while Wired Magazine keeps track of the ’spin jobs’. Some folks reckon that this flurry of editing has to do with the quantity over quality model of Wiki itself. Meanwhile, there’s also been a somewhat quieter revelation that the Wiki logo itself is fundementally flawed. According to the New York Times, the Wiki logo (a puzzle piece globe that contains characters from a myriad of languages) has errors which hamper the design. Apparently (hey, I have to take their word for it - I’m not exactly an expert in Sansckrit) two of the characters — one in Japanese and one in Devanagari, the script used in Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages — are meaningless because of minor slips. The article goes on -

Paul Stansifer, 21, of Somerville, Mass., who came up with the globe design as part of a logo design contest among Wikipedia users, shares that sentiment. He wrote by e-mail that by showing an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, Wikipedia was, “as far as I know, the only Web site whose logo is a disclaimer (‘This Web site is a work in progress.’)” The contest was in 2003, when Wikipedia was still a rather obscure Web site with the dream of creating “a free encyclopedia for everyone on the planet.” Yet others thought that Mr. Stansifer’s execution left something to be desired.

David Friedland, who describes himself as “one of those people who hated it,” set out to improve the design. Using “what little aesthetic sense I had” as well as a software program to create a 3-D effect, Mr. Friedland said he made the puzzle pieces more subtle — with indentations rather than dark lines — and used single characters rather than words, which he thought had cluttered up the design.

But in the process, Mr. Friedland, who has a degree in computer science and linguistics, introduced the errors. He said he tried to pick characters that were from a wide range of languages (including Klingon in the far upper right) that looked interesting and generally represented a W sound. The Devanagari error was caused by a computer glitch, he said, which swapped the order of two parts of the character; the Japanese error was simply carelessness.

The errors have been discussed ad nauseum among Wiki kids for years, but have not been corrected, due to the fact that the original designer lost the source files and is “too busy to start from scratch”. Now a software developer for Microsoft offshoot Tellme, Friedland told the NYT that he had moved on and wanted to hand off responsibility.

“I have tried to reconstruct it, but it never looks right,” he said. “The whole thing should be redrawn by a professional illustrator.”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Logo design news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.