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Provisional new Wiktionary logo chosen
Wiktionary essentially has two logos at the moment. Supported by a straw poll in April 2009, a group of Wiktionary editors began a second logo contest, to unify Wiktionary's visual identity.
The second round of voting for this logo selection process concluded on 31 January 2010. Although the results are not yet official, the puzzle dictionary logo appears to have won with 558 votes, while the tiles logo received 455 votes. Each language Wiktionary will vote on whether to approve the winning logo, with a 60% approval rate required for adoption.
Global sysops
Global sysops are very much like stewards (they have cross-wiki adminship), however, they are meant for small wikis that do not have a large number of administrators.
Proposal
Below are the exact words of the proposal:
Because of a shortage of stewards and the continued abuse of our wikis, a new global user group is proposed: global sysops. These people would be highly trusted users with a strong track record of cross-wiki contributions. Global sysops would be given sysop-like privileges on many small wikis, but would not be simply users with sysop tools on all wikis. In addition to the standard tools, they would have access to global blocking, but would use these tools only in urgent cases of abuse, or for non-controversial maintenance. They would have no editorial control over content or the local community
By default, global sysop would be enabled for every project that meets one of the following criteria:
- fewer than ten administrators exist; or
- fewer than three administrators have made a logged action within the past two months.
Projects may opt-in or opt-out at their own discretion if they obtain local consensus. Simply inform any steward of the community's decision. A wiki set will be used to give rights on the included wikis only.
Complaints
Some concerns have been brought up, like the fact that for small-language Wikipedias, the global sysops might have to rely on a somewhat clumsy tool like Google Translate. Also, many users are concerned about the possibility of misuse of the global blocking ability.
Voting
For more information about the proposal, please visit the proposal description page. The voting phase, however, has now closed, and a final list of voters can be seen here.
Steward elections
Candidate submissions for the Steward elections 2010 are going on now. A steward is basically a cross-wiki admin. To nominate a user through January 28, visit m:Stewards/elections 2010. Voting will begin February 7 at the same location.
Strategic planning
The Wikimedia Strategic Planning task force's recommendations for 2010 are up for discussion at the recommendations page. The recommendations are based on strategy and discussion, providing suggestions for the future of Wikimedia.
Discuss this story
In my opinion the puzzle logo should be used as the main logo, as it is a lot more visually appealing than the other one, and it gives some sort of a connection to Wikipedia. It would also give the project a "fresh look". --Footyfanatic3000 (talk · contribs) 19:58, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think all wikimedia project logos should use a puzzle theme and the same font KlokkoVanDenBerg (talk) 10:54, 4 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As I said in the vote, the winner here is pretty much unusable as a logo: it works well in big scale (like on this page), but doesn't work in small scale at all. Too much little details, too much scales of gray. The Scrabble piece logo concept would have worked much better in smaller scale and it's easier to localise. I'm also a bit annoyed that the final decision is still a loooong time in the future - but fortunately, on the other hand (with no offence to the fine designer intended) the somewhat unusable logo can still be caught between the cogs of the giant bureaucracy of ours and get torn to shreds. =) --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 17:15, 6 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]