Yana Welinder wrote:
I'm happy to announce that we are re-licensing the Wikimedia logos on Commons to CC BY-SA 3.0: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/10/24/wikimedia-logos-have-been-freed/
Hi.
I found this blog post pretty confusing. It is not obvious to me which logos we're talking about specifically. We have many logos on Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Copyright_by_Wikimedia has over 4,000 files in it) and while the blog post mentions "an extensive review of their copyright status," it's completely unclear to me which specific logos were part of this review. Was this a public review? Are there notes on a wiki somewhere?
My best guess is that we're only talking about the images listed here: https://www.wikimedia.org/, though this guess may be wildly inaccurate.
The blog post also includes https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ThreeCircles.svg, but I'm honestly not sure why given that the post is about Wikimedia logos and this... isn't a Wikimedia logo, as far as I'm aware. This image's only use seems to be on a silly Meta-Wiki page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Red,_green,_and_blue. As a long-time Wikimedian, I read this blog post and wasn't really sure what was being discussed. I have difficulty imagining that members of the general public fared much better. If the takeaway of this post was that the Wikipedia logo is now released under a free license, I think that message got lost.
Lastly, I'm curious how this blog post aligns with a file deletion that took place a week prior. "File:Wikipedia puzzle globe 3D render.zip" was deleted from wikimediafoundation.org on October 17, 2014 with the reason "Trademark - we have copies if needed". I found this deletion troubling given that I'm almost certain that this file was the subject of contentious debate for years prior to finally being published. The May 2013 upload log entries state that the files are from May 2009. The sudden unexplained deletion of a piece of Wikipedia's history leaves me concerned.
MZMcBride