(Sorry for late response, this email fell into cracks of my messy inbox)

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 1:53 PM bawolff <bawolff+wn@gmail.com> wrote:

TBH, I was under the impression that the second round was going to be narrowing down to top contenders (maybe the 3 or so top designs), not choosing the top contender (I guess that's my fault though, it wasn't stated anywhere that that was going to be the case or anything).

Actually the plan originally was to put anything that passed the basic wiki thresholds (70%) but nothing beside the first proposal did. I could add the proposal one and the other ones as runner ups but honestly it feels weird advancing a logo design that had an opposition for each support.

It was kind of hard to follow the first round with 20 something proposals

It was only 17, didn't even reach 20.

with some of them benefiting from showing up earlier than others, and most of the votes taking place during the time period where votes were allegedly not going to count yet.

That's true, I accept the mess up on my side (I have been planning this and asking around for more than a year now but it's not like you coordinate such changes on a monthly basis, I'm definitely learning), I tried to compensate by giving a full month for the voting period which is pretty long plus giving periodic reminders.

I did notice that some of the people voting had never previously edited mediawiki.org (Or made very few previous edits). It kind of feels a little weird to treat this as a "vote" (and not a "consensus" building exercise) if we don't have eligibility criteria.

This is the part that changing the mediawiki logo is different from the usual wikimedia decision making process. The reason is that in for example English Wikipedia, the biggest venue of contribution is en.wikipedia.org but the biggest venue for contributing to mediawiki is not mediawiki.org, you make patches, you report bugs, you help people in IRC, and so on. If you counted that, I assume a huge portion of the voters would be considered eligible if we count venues like phabricator and gerrit. Also for example for "picture of the year competition" in Commons, the eligibility is not the number of edits in commons. It's the number of edits in any wiki and if we want to count the number of edits in any wiki too, then I'm pretty sure virtually every voter would be considered eligible.

I do kind of wish there was a none of the above option.

Proposal four was the status quo, it clearly didn't pass (with 39%)

Looking through the votes, I definitely see some people saying things like "Least bad option", which is not exactly an inspiring show of support.

Well, for each neutral or weak support in the proposal six, there was one person who showed "strong support". And this is the thing with logos, it's not like a voting on a policy change, supporting or not supporting a logo is a very subjective matter, for a similar situation look at elections, there are people who go crazy about a candidate and people who are just like "less horrible than the other candidate" and this is normal, people are different with different perspective, If I wanted to force my perspective, I would have advanced the first proposal too and even in the variants for the current proposal, my favorites are not getting anywhere but that's okay. Logos have lots of oobjective factors (like accessibility, proper abstraction, color consistency, simplicity, brand awareness, etc.) but the biggest one is the general look and feel and it differs from person to person. That's why companies do extensive A/B testing on design, it caused backlash too, for example a lead designer who left Google in protest that they were doing A/B testing on forty different shades of blue which basically destroyed the artistic freedom of designers (we are not going in that direction but we need to acknowledge the subjectivity of designs)

HTH

--
Brian
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:50 AM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey,
The first round was using the standard voting process in wikis (using support/oppose and the thresholds like 70%) and this is the way we elect admins, checkusers or other user rights, or change policies in Wikis. I don't recall that there has ever been anyone elected as admin with below 70% or we have ever changed any policies with below 70% (not to mention the runner up logos are 56% and 61%, basically for any support, they had an opposition). Our logo is similar, no logo except proposal six could reach seventy percent and while there were good designs that almost made it but clearly none of them has enough support (and percentage of support) to reach the next round. That's a pity (one of the runner ups was actually by me) but if that's what the community wants, I happily accept it.

The second round has always been about different variants of the logos that pass the first round.

HTH
On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 9:30 AM Adam Wight <adam.wight@wikimedia.de> wrote:
Hi, thanks for helping coordinate this process!

I have concerns about what happened between round 1 and round 2, it seems that we're no longer left with a real choice. It's unclear what method was used to tally the round 1 votes, was this a "support percentage"? Whenever a vote is taken, it's important to stick to democratic norms, basically "one person, one vote". Round 2 is entirely variations on a single proposal, which disenfranchises everyone who didn't prefer that design. Is it too late to discuss?

Kind regards,
Adam

On 9/25/20 11:42 PM, Amir Sarabadani wrote:
Hello,

The subject line is self-explanatory, you can go to the voting page and cast your vote.

This is going to continue for a month and it's about different variants of the top contender (different colors, different wordmarks, etc.). You need to order logos based on your preference (the most preferred one first, the least preferred one the last) and then cast your vote. The final winner will be chosen using Schulze method.

If you have mistakenly voted in the test phase, you can just copy your vote from the test page to the actual voting page (the numbers of logos haven't changed).

Special thank you to Chuck Roslof from WMF legal for doing the preliminary clearance of the proposal.

Have a nice weekend!

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Amir (he/him)
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