Has anyone else noticed - the favicon for D&D 5th Edition Wikia looks to be copied from this meta SE. Is there a reason for this? Does anyone here care?
I suppose it looks like it's not exactly the same... but it is basically impossible to tell from a glance when I have 50 tabs open in Chrome. Definitely still seems copied.
They are not necessarily the same.
RPG.SE meta's favicon is a gray d20 outline. I'm not able to upload the .ico file here, but it has a MD5 hash c7f81da9029121051950ae912546a092.
The engl DND5 wikia's favicon is a black d20 outline. The .ico file has a MD5 hash 82f5514407b95ad867762108f1e02953. This means it's a different file.
(For those who want to check sources: Go to either site, view page source, find "shortcut icon" in the page header HTML, and download the file from the URI. Then check the file's MD5 hash.)
Also, on their front page, they have the following disclaimer:
d20 dice favicon was created by Andrew Doane from the Noun Project and is licensed under the Creative Commons CCBY.
Is it possible that the wikia owners copied RPG.SE meta's favicon, changed the color, and then used it for themselves? Yes. But we have no proof.
It is entirely possible that, like this site, they decided to use a d20 icon because their site features information about a d20 system. RPG.SE doesn't have a copyright on the d20 outline design. It's a minimalistic design and, if you image search for "d20 icon", you will find that most of the results have a similar appearance.
I took a look at the two icons, zoomed to 1600%. I looked especially at the edges of the lines to see if there were matching aliasing patterns. An icon can be recoloured, but matching gradients in the semi-transparent aliasing pixels would be a likely result even after a recolour.
It doesn’t look like they’re derived one from the other. There are many similar parts, but no matches. The Wiki icon is also one pixel wider, and the centre horizontal line is one pixel higher. Each of the left and right sides have vertical aliasing that doesn’t appear in the SE one, and there’s aliasing in the centre in very different patterns.
Although it’s technically possible it’s a copy, it’s practically implausible. The amount of pixel-level doctoring to hide copying would have been immense, negating several times over any time or effort savings copying would offer.
It’s likely just that the design was independently arrived at. At worst, the design (rather than the file) was copied and independently created. Even that’s somewhat unlikely given the obviousness of the design. There are just too many aliasing details that don’t match for it to be a file copy, making it highly unlikely.
I mean... you'd have to ask whoever runs that wikia. Only they could answer where they chose the favicon or whether they took it from here.
It does appear identical.
(I don't know if someone here originally created the favicon for this meta site.)
