Hi all -- I just signed up to this list and was looking atht e archives a bit. I noticed the discussion about the Wikimania German site, and was curious after reading this comment:
Part of their logo, however, is a distorted version of the Wikipedia
logo, which I believe is not kosher; whoever contacts them to request they change their logo should also press them to change the name of the project.
I went to the site and it did look a lot like our logo. But I found a little section on their page about themselves which talks about their logo: http://www.wikimania.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Wikimania:%C3%9Cber_Wikimani...
See the "Unser LOGO" section. My German isn't that great anymore but they basically say they got theirs from a book which came out in 2001 and that it is very sad that we picked a similar logo (if I'm not reading it wrong, they are subtlely claiming that we stole in from them).
The book: http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~gutsche/ideen-werkstatt/Ssingh2.jpg
This is from 2001, our current logo didn't evolve until 2003 according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Logos_and_slogans
So... yeah. Looking over the logo discussion, I don't see any evidence that our current logo was influenced by that book or the German website: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Paullusmagnus-logo_%28small%29.png
Our progression was: 1. Text on a ball 2. Ball made of puzzle 3. Text on puzzle 4. Individual letters on puzzle It seems like an independent visual genealogy, unless I'm missing something. Very odd. Anyway, I don't think we have a strong claim about them copying us.
So.. beyond that.. hi! Glad to be here!
FF