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Some Errors Defy Fixes: A Typo in Wikipedia’s Logo Fractures the Sanskrit
« on: 2007-06-25 16:55:59 » |
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Here's a link to the ubiquitous graphic-in-question:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/06/24/technology/20070625_WIKIPEDIA_GRAPHIC.html
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The New York Times
June 25, 2007
Some Errors Defy Fixes: A Typo in Wikipedia’s Logo Fractures the Sanskrit
By NOAM COHEN
The symbolism is not exactly ideal. Those on the lookout for errors at Wikipedia have flagged a few more — this time, however, they are not examples of vandalism at the user-created site but typographical errors in Wikipedia’s own logo.
In postings on internal mailing groups, users of Wikipedia have described obvious mistakes in the design, a globelike jigsaw puzzle with characters from various languages on the pieces. Two of the characters — one in Japanese and one in Devanagari, the script used in Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages — are meaningless because of minor slips.
Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, says the symbolism may not be so unfortunate. “The nature of Wikipedia is such that because it is written by everyone, there are errors,” he said. But he added that it was the nature of the project that errors would be noticed and corrected.
Paul Stansifer, 21, of Somerville, Mass., who came up with the globe design as part of a contest among Wikipedia users, shares that sentiment. He wrote by e-mail that by showing an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, Wikipedia was, “as far as I know, the only Web site whose logo is a disclaimer (‘This Web site is a work in progress.’)”
The contest was in 2003, when Wikipedia was still a rather obscure Web site with the dream of creating “a free encyclopedia for everyone on the planet.” Yet others thought that Mr. Stansifer’s execution left something to be desired.
David Friedland, who describes himself as “one of those people who hated it,” set out to improve the design. Using “what little aesthetic sense I had” as well as a software program to create a 3-D effect, Mr. Friedland said he made the puzzle pieces more subtle — with indentations rather than dark lines — and used single characters rather than words, which he thought had cluttered up the design.
But in the process, Mr. Friedland, who has a degree in computer science and linguistics, introduced the errors. He said he tried to pick characters that were from a wide range of languages (including Klingon in the far upper right) that looked interesting and generally represented a W sound. The Devanagari error was caused by a computer glitch, he said, which swapped the order of two parts of the character; the Japanese error was simply carelessness.
Though the errors have been discussed among cognoscenti for more than two years, they have not been fixed, mainly because Mr. Friedland says he lost the original computer file and is too busy to start from scratch. “I can’t find the settings I used to make it,” he said. “Three years ago I was unemployed, in my room all day, finishing my degree.”
Now a software developer for a Microsoft subsidiary, Tellme, Mr. Friedland said he had moved on and wanted to hand off responsibility.
“I have tried to reconstruct it, but it never looks right,” he said. “The whole thing should be redrawn by a professional illustrator.”
A user named Kizu Naoko, 39, who lives near Osaka, Japan, said that most Japanese users favored making the fix. But in an e-mail message, she added: “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.” NOAM COHEN
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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