Logo concept vote

Earlier this week, the voting for the logo concept for Wikifunctions concluded. We are very happy to have seen so much participation in the process — to be honest, I was personally worried whether there would be enough participation or not.

The last time we started Wikimedia projects was in 2012: Wikidata was started from scratch, and Wikivoyage moved to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikivoyage came with an already existing community, and for Wikidata we presented the project in many face-to-face events as it was getting started, talking with many members of the global Wikimedia community. The two projects had their logo votes in 2012 and 2013, where Wikidata saw 493 voters, Wikivoyage saw 521 voters.

I was worried that we would fall short of both numbers: due to global events, there was no Wikimania at which we could have explained the importance of Wikifunctions in person. Wikimania 2012 was a huge boost for Wikidata, a place where we could share excitement, answer questions, and find our first Wikipedia communities willing to try out Wikidata. For Wikifunctions, we did go to many virtual events, but we didn’t know how successful these would be in creating excitement and helping people to understand what we are doing.

I am thus extremely pleased to see that 561 voters participated in the Wikifunctions logo concept vote, casting 1051 votes on the 22 logo concepts which were taken from the almost fifty submitted proposals and variants. The race was very tight for the first week, and then one proposal started gathering more momentum, eventually displaying a quite comfortable lead over the runner-up. Proposal 11 had 124 votes, and thus is the community favorite.

It is followed by Proposal 5 with 112 votes and Proposal 9 with 107 votes. (We have vetted the votes of the winning proposal, but we did not go through all votes on all proposals beyond that, so numbers are not final.)

I am personally saddened that my favorite proposal not only didn’t win, but in fact ended up not fourth, but fourth from the bottom of the list.

We have now forwarded the results to the Legal department of the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to screen the top logo concept. After this, we will let the design team have a pass on the logo. We expect that this whole process will take four to six weeks, depending on possible complications, and hope to be able to announce the refined logo by the end of April.

Congratulations to user NGC 54 for creating the winning proposal! Congratulations to Jon Harald Søby and Steven Liu Yi for having their logos perform so well! Thanks to everyone who has submitted a proposal, and to everyone who has participated in the contest.

30 Lexic-o-days

The Wikidata team have begun a festival of events bringing focus around lexicographic data on Wikidata, which will be a key part of the future of Wikifunctions and particularly Abstract Wikipedia. Check out the 30 Lexic-o-days program, and if you want to see something happen there, feel free to join in or to suggest it!

The submissions for focus languages for Abstract Wikipedia and the lexicographic extension for Wikidata are on-going. We currently have seven applications, and the last day to apply is April 7: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/Focus_languages

During the 30 Lexic-o-days, we will also have Question and Answer sessions regarding the Focus language selection. There will be two of them to accommodate two different time zones: March 30th, 17:00 UTC, and April 6th, 03:00 UTC

Other

“XLSemanal”, the most widely circulated magazine in Spain, had an article about Abstract Wikipedia: https://www.xlsemanal.com/conocer/tecnologia/20210225/wikipedia-20-aniversario-mayor-enciclopedia-historia.html (it is mostly a translation of the article published earlier this year in the German magazine “Der Spiegel”)