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.’)”