Updating the typography on all Wikimedia sites - Wikimedia-l

26 Mar 2014

Hi all,

I wanted to give people an extra notice that we're updating the default
typography across all Wikimedia sites, for users of the Vector skin. This
was mentioned in the last Tech News edition that goes out to all local
wikis, and also announced by our Release Manager, Greg Grossmeier, as part
of the software deployment roadmap.

This will happen in the following order:

   1. Test wikis and mediawiki.org tomorrow. That's Thursday, March 27th.
   2. Non-Wikipedia projects on Tuesday, April 1th.
   3. All Wikipedias on Thursday April 3rd.

If people have questions, there is a summary of the changes and an
extensive FAQ at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh. There
will also be a post at blog.wikimedia.org tomorrow morning.

For a bit more backstory, this is the first time we're graduating something
from the opt-in "beta features" framework to the stable version of
Wikimedia sites. This has been in beta for desktop users since November
2013,[1] and has been tested by more than 10,000 registered users across
Wikimedia communities.

Thanks to the many editors and readers who took time to send us comments or
questions. This feature went through several major iterations based on
community feedback -- there were 100+ discussion threads on the Talk page,
in addition to mailing list discussions. We're really lucky to have so many
Wikimedians willing to get their hands dirty when it comes to the dark art
of web typography. ;-) Congrats to the designers, engineers, and others who
volunteered their time to help make this ready to release as new default
typography.

P.S. Apologies for cross-posting this and spamming your inbox, if you're
also on wikitech-l or other technical mailing lists.

1. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/07/introducing-beta-features/

-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/