History
An initial design of the logo was created by Paul Stansifer, a 21-year-old Wikipedia user, whose entry won a design competition run by the site in 2003. It was then improved by former student and software developer, David Friedland. He changed the styling of the jigsaw pieces so that their boundaries seemed indented and simplified their contents to be a single glyph, rather than a word. In the process, some errors were introduced. In particular, one piece of Devanagari script and one piece of Japanese katakana were incorrectly displayed.
In 2007, a modified 3D model was developed by Wikimedia Taiwan for Wikimania, when they distributed a 3-inch diameter spherical puzzle based on the logo, that attendees could piece together. It did not add other letters on the parts that cannot be seen on the 2D logo, but used that space to include small logos of the sister projects and information about Wikimania. A variant of that model was used to build a person-sized Wikiball that spun on a stand, featured during the event. This led to a renewed interest in getting a proper 3D model for the logo.
By 2007, users on listservs discovered that the logo had some minor errors. The errors were not immediately fixed, because, according to Friedland, he could not locate the original project file. Friedland added that "I have tried to reconstruct it, but it never looks right" and that the logo "should be redrawn by a professional illustrator." Kizu Naoko (木津 尚子?), a Wikipedian, said that most Japanese users supported correcting the errors. In an e-mail to Noam Cohen of The New York Times, Kizu said that "It could be an option to leave them as they are. Most people don't take it serious and think the graphical logo is a sort of pot-au-feu of various letters without meaning."
Read more about this topic: Logo Of Wikipedia
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