Hi,
I personally like the new logo, but from the discussion on en.wikt, we/they have resisted it so long that I suspect it would seem to be losing face to back down now. I believe a portion of the resistance is due to a rumour that Hasbro have some kind of legal claim to a scrabble tile, and so we might be infringing on that; if that rumour could be publicly debunked that would help.
The favicon I regard as a non-issue and is not really relevant here. All(?) Wikipedias use an, almost universally recognised, globe logo; they should have a globe favicon. Wiktionary doesn't have a clearly preferred logo, but the W is about the only feature common to both (though on the tiles I think it is a true W as opposed to overlayed Vs).
Conrad
2009/3/25 Jay Walsh jwalsh@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
Just wanted to second Cary's note - we talked about it briefly today. A single brand identity for the project would be so much stronger, so I encourage discussion on the matter. I completely appreciate the challenges and how things have evolved up to this point, but it would certainly be worth a deeper discussion and resolution.
Generally speaking we want to ensure all of the brand identities line up across languages. I'm always impressed by the simple and elegant way the project marks get localized in other languages/scripts but still nicely translate with the visual style.
Best,
-- Jay Walsh Head of Communications WikimediaFoundation.org +1 (415) 839 6885 x 609
On Mar 24, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Cary Bass wrote:
Hi all,
The two largest Wiktionary projects (English and French) have two completely different logos. [1], [2]
The reason for this, from what I understand, is that a vote was taken place about the logo fr.wiktionary currently has, on meta [3]; which the English Wiktionary community chose not to be bound by, because they, as a community, disagreed with the outcome.
I understand that there are complaints that new logo has elements too closely resembling Scrabble pieces, or are otherwise too cartooned to some. The "new" logo does maintain some visual identity as a project logo, while the "classic" logo isn't really a logo at all, and diverges wildly from project to project. Of the top ten Wiktionary projects, four of them use the new version, while 6 of them use some variation of the classic version:
fr: new en: classic tr: new vi: new ru: classic (a variation which little resembles the original) io: classic (English version) el: new zh: classic (divergent variation) pl: classic (divergent variation) fi: classic (English version)
As a whole, I seem to remember that Wiktionary is the second most visited site of the Foundation's websites, and I really do think it should be appropriate that the site should reflect a common visual identity, one that the classic logo does a poor job of creating. The new logo, however, met with rather heavy resistance in, at the very least, the English Wiktionary community.
I do, rather strongly, believe that the Wiktionary identity needs to be squared away, having some poll in general inclusive of, yet binding of all Wiktionary projects, and then if that fails, starting the process again, and succeeding to foment an individual logo like the recent successful Wikibooks logo revamp.
Cary
[1] http://en.wiktionary.org [2] http://fr.wiktionary.org [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo
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