Wikipedia Mash up

I stumbled upon a rather interesting logo definition for Wikipedia. The logo in the site, Wikipedia has rather an earth like image with a character that piques to the alphabet "W". Now this "W" is a representation from several language and this has taken a beating from two languages - Japanese and Sanskrit.

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. 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.

The founder could easily cool his heels by saying "The nature of Wikipedia is such that because it is written by everyone, there are errors,”. Also, the logo, showing an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, Wikipedia was, “as far as I know, the only website whose logo is a disclaimer (‘This website is a work in progress.’)”

It seemed like they 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 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, Friedland said he had moved on and wanted to hand off responsibility. Call that the boss ! Now the portal is making big strides has ironically no captain to take it to the shore !