I have a feeling
that we'll all be doing this for a long time, so we might as well try
to like each other. :-)

Amen to that Erik :-).  Me and Srikanth, very much want webfonts to improve, be expanded to mobile and make for an excellent UX . Thats the reason we are persisting in testing even though at times it feels we are butting our heads against a wall.

It remains to
be seen whether we can get sufficient testing done via opt-in methods
and dark launches, although I'm certainly strongly encouraging
experimentation with both.

For Tamil, we think we have evolved a suitable balance to achieve this (apart from Siebrand's dark launch idea). A gradual - less active to more active wikiproject launch. (explained in the original mail). We adopted this after our first Narayam launch had to be rolled back due to bugs. It was a bit time consuming and took longer, but was iterative and extremely satisfactory

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle@gmail.com> wrote:

> So stating the truth is being unconstructive?. You could have rolled this
> out in phases or as a "dark launch" as you are contemplating now, done more
> testing and saved us all this bitterness and trouble. Instead you decided to
> go live on a massive scale without adequate testing in live environment
> being accessed by millions of people everyday.

Although, the largest of the Indic language Wikipedias gets about
1/900th the traffic of English Wikipedia in traffic. [1] I think it's
appropriate to be a bit more experimental at that scale. It remains to
be seen whether we can get sufficient testing done via opt-in methods
and dark launches, although I'm certainly strongly encouraging
experimentation with both.

Your comparison with top web properties is flawed alongside another
dimension: no other top web property has to solve the kinds of
problems we're trying to solve here with a staff of three
internationalization developers, one product manager and no QA team
(!). Although we're larger now than a year ago and the year before,
and we're still adding engineers and support resources, we have lots
of big problems to solve in parallel. We don't have the luxury of
being able to do just one thing extremely well, much as we might want
to.

On the other hand, what makes Wikimedia unique is precisely the fact
that we're all working together to continually improve and fix things.
In the best case scenario, that's a happy partnership. And as you well
know, folks like Santhosh, Siebrand, Gerard, Niklas and Amir have made
tremendous contributions as volunteers, well before being on staff. So
we should strive for being collegial and forgiving. I have a feeling
that we'll all be doing this for a long time, so we might as well try
to like each other. :-)

I applaud the i18n team for being bold and pushing things forward,
while also reflecting on the process at this opportune time. I'm also
grateful to you, to Srikanth and others for being both supportive and
critical voices along the process, and getting very involved to fix
things. Improving language support is a huge, daunting undertaking.
WMF is only one player in this and it'll require continued, joint
effort from all fronts.

All best,
Erik

[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN_India/ReportCardIndia.htm
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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