History[edit]

Wikipedia's logo used from 2003 until 2010

Logo creator Paul Stansifer at the Wikimedia Foundation in front of the Wikipedia Puzzle Globe Logo sculpture
in May 2012

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia logos for details of previous logos, including the glyphs used.
The design of "W IKIPEDIA" text beneath a globe, with the interlocking-V W and large A, was designed
by Wikipedia user The Cunctator for a November 2001 logo contest.[5] An initial design of the puzzle-
globe logo was created by Paul Stansifer, a then 17-year-old Wikipedia user, whose entry won a
design competition run by the site in 2003. Another Wikipedia user, David Friedland, subsequently
improved the logo by changing the styling of the jigsaw pieces so that their boundaries seemed
indented and simplified their contents to be a single glyph per piece, rather than a jumble of
nonsense multilingual text.[6] In the process, some errors were introduced.[6] In particular, one piece
of Devanagari script and one piece of Japanese katakana were incorrectly rendered.[7] Also,
the Chinese character (袓) has no immediate connection with Wikipedia.

Current logo[edit]
Glyphs contained in the new logotype

A "Wikiball"

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.[8] This led to a renewed interest in getting a proper 3D model for the logo.
The 3D Wikipedia puzzle from Wikimania 2007

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."[6] 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 [sic] and think the graphical logo is a sort of pot-au-feu of various letters without meaning."[6]
In late 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation undertook to fix the errors and generally update the puzzle
globe logo. Among other concerns, the original logo did not scale well and some letters appeared
distorted.[9] For the new logo, the Wikimedia Foundation defined which characters appear on the
"hidden" puzzle pieces, and had a three-dimensional computer model of the globe created to allow
the generation of other views.[10] A partial 3D globe was commissioned for the Wikimedia office.[11]
The logo was rolled out on the projects in May 2010. It features the new 3D rendering of the puzzle
globe, with corrected characters (and the Klingon character replaced by a Ge'ez character).
The wordmark has been modified from the Hoefler Text font to the open-source Linux Libertine font,
and the subtitle is no longer italicized. The "W" character, which was used in various other places in
Wikipedia (such as the favicon) and was a "distinctive part of the Wikipedia brand", was stylized as
crossed V's in the original logo, ⟨W⟩, while the W in Linux Libertine is rendered with a single line. To
provide the traditional appearance of the Wikipedia "W", a "crossed" W was added as
an OpenType variant to the Linux Libertine font.[1]
On October 24, 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation released the logo, along with all other logos
belonging to the Foundation, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.[12]
On September 29, 2017, the logo of Wikipedia was submerged to the bottom of Armenia’s Lake
Sevan thanks to the joint efforts of Wikimedia Armenia and ArmDiving divers’ club. The logo is an
unfinished globe made of puzzle pieces with symbols (including Armenian “v” letter) from different
sign systems written on them. The 2m wide, 2m high logo (the largest in the world) was made in
Armenia for the annual meeting of the Central and Eastern Europe Wikimedia affiliates, Wikimedia
CEE Meeting that the country hosted in August 2016 in Dilijan.[13]