[Wikipedia-l] Voting versus consensus

[Ray Saintonge]

tarquin wrote:

> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>> What was missing was a good overview of the pros and cons of each 
>> logo.  This has technical reasons -- with the pages already very big 
>> and over 130  submissions, discussions had to be relegated to 
>> relatively hidden talk  pages. I'm not very happy with this, because 
>> I believe in the principle of  *informed* democracy. 
>
> Yes, I agree entirely with this.
> I think the winner got so many votes because it incorporates words in 
> many languages, which probably appealed to people because it looks 
> "international".
> But this excessive text is *exactly* what makes it a terrible logo - 
> it doesn't scale down and the filesize is TOO BIG for the web.

After reading more about this subject than I care to, and not being 
particularly enthusiastic about the results, I do want to make a suggestion.

1. Use the puzzle piece logo (with modifications) as the logo for Wikimedia.
    a. Get rid of the meaningless text from the surface of the globe.
    b. In each pussle piece include the 2-letter ISO639-1 code for some 
language, oriented to conform with the position of that piece on the 
globe.  These letters can be omitted from scaled down versions of the logo.
    c. The centre puzzle piece should preferably be blank to generically 
represent all the non-Wikipedia projects.  The worst thing you could put 
in the centre piece would be "en"

2. Each project could design its own logo, use the one it already has or 
use a temporary generic logo while it is designing its own.
    a. A key required element of each logo would be a single puzzle 
peice.  It would be up to the participants of that project to determine 
how that puzzle piece would be worked into aesthetic conformity with the 
existing design.
    b. The puzzle piece would either be blank or contain the 2-letter 
code for that language.

3. The underlying concept is that Wikimedia brings together the diverse 
puzzle pieces to form a single world.  Each project is one piece of that 
puzzle.

Ec.