Hello,
After more than one year of design, discussion, vote, iteration, and months
of legal work, I’m happy to announce that the logo of MediaWiki has been
officially changed. This applies to both the software and logo of
https://mediawiki.org.
The old logo of MediaWiki was adopted slightly more than fifteen years ago.
This logo was featuring the nice concept of a sunflower representing
diversity, constant growth and also wilderness.
However, with years, the logo became outdated and we realized that it had
several problems, including but not limited to:
- It was a bitmap picture so it’s unusable in large sizes
- Its high details (“too realistic”) made it unusable in small sizes
- Its fixed and realistic style made it hard to have variations or
adaptations
Most, virtually all, software products use a simpler and more abstract form
following basic logo design guidelines and best-practices to avoid above
(and more) issues. For example, docker, kubernetes, Ubuntu, Vue.js, React,
Apache Kafka and many more.
You can find the discussion of changing the logo in
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaW…
. As you can see on this page, a lot of interesting practical and
theoretical exchanges happened, leading to the final vote and decision.
The new logo represents a collection of projects built on our engine: each
petal is one of the many wikis that we support, and the lack of an explicit
core shows that we are part of these projects, as well as and they are part
of MediaWiki. The new logo also reflects the fact that evolution never
stops, and like the petals of a flower, the development of each project,
the growth of each community built on our engine allows everyone else to
grow.
The designer of the new logo is [[User:Serhio Magpie]]. With the nice
abstraction baked-in, you can use it in large or small sizes or you can
adapt it for different usecases (there’s one already for mediawiki on
docker:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T274678). There is a logo
guideline for MediaWiki now:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_logo_guidelines
We already deployed changes to
mediawiki.org and landed related patches on
master, meaning from 1.36 release onwards, it’ll come with the new logo.
You can follow the work of rolling it out in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T268230.
I humbly ask Wikimedians to update their wikis, for example usages on the
main pages, Wikipedia articles, templates, and more. You can use the logos
in this category on Commons. The files are already protected against upload
vandalism.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MediaWiki_logo_(2020)
A big thank you to all who helped this project to finish. From designers,
community members, people who voted and discussed it intensively for
months, Wikimedia Legal for doing all the necessary work for transferring
the rights, clearing it and filing it for trademark. And many many more
people.
Best
--
Amir (he/him)