Wikipedia has become a bit of a whipping boy for its mistakes, and this has now been extended to the logo. It seems that two of the characters used on the globe -- "one in Japanese and one in Devanagari, the script used in Sanskrit and several modern Indian languages -- are meaningless because of minor slips," reports The New York Times.
The logo design was a competition winner from Paul Stansifer, but the errors were introduced by someone improving it.
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.
Sure, someone could fix it, but "Friedland says he lost the original computer file".
