Hoi, There are many languages that are problematic including Khmer, Cherokee and Burmese. Also the question what languages do we have projects in is wrong. The issue is that we should be able to support all languages. When a language is not supported in Unicode, it becomes a different issue because MediaWiki only supports languages that are supported in. Also specifying it as any free font has its pitfalls. There should be fonts for all the big operating systems. When we want to adopt a policy like the one that is being discussed, we should actively support our users. Currently we do not inform our users how and where to find the fonts they need to see all of our content. In the articles about languages it is often said that you may not be able to see all the content .. go away and look for a font. When you want to have a strict policy about Free and unencumbered software, you have to accept the consequences and enable people to use Free and unencumbered software. This does include fonts. Thanks, Gerard< On 9/3/07, Gregory Maxwell &lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 9/3/07, GerardM &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Cherokee is supported by several fonts. Support for it is included in many linux desktops, including the Fedora system which is on my laptop. Myanmar (Burmese) is supported by a free font (http://www.myanmarnlp.net.mm/opentype.htm). The language also has some more demands on the layout and rendering engine (it has to support a lot of face substitution).. but Myanmar is supported on free systems either using the Pango myanmar module or the m17n package. Free fonts for Khmer can be found at http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/download/fonts. Likewise Khmer needs some substitution/layout rules.. Likewise, Khmer is supported by m17n and the latest pango. Just about all fonts of interest are available in truetype form. They'll run on all "major operating systems". No, actually it doesn't include fonts. No one has made this argument has actually be able to produce an example of a actual gap related to fonts and if found no such gap would exist for long due to the lack of copyrightability of the font faces themselves, if nothing else. Fonts simply are not an area where there is any conflict with free software, nor in area where there should ever be a conflict.

On 9/4/07, GerardM &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes fonts are a pain. But the font that I've mentioned are all TTF, and will work on any reasonable modern system. Amusingly.. it is free fonts that reduce the pain since they are available to more people and can be distributed more liberally. I haven't commented on the proposed policy as others have stated my views more clearly than I would... but I do not see how you reach this conclusion. The policy would require that things we distribute will work with freely licensed tools. This is already believed to be the existing practice. So far you haven't shown us an example of text we distribute which can't be used with freely licensed tools, so there is no conflict. Perhaps most people will read the text using non-free fonts, just like most people browse the site with IE on Windows... Our practice is to avoid doing things which make the decision to use free tools hard for those who would not choose to use propritary tools. I feel sorry for people who browse our site using IE on Windows, but that they do is their choice, and it has no direct conflict with making sure that our work is useful for people without Windows.

There seems to be a desire by the board to put things in writing. There are some benefits to this. While the community knows what our values are (since they are our values), we would never do anything against this policy. However, the staff at WMF aren't necessarily members of the community with the same values we have - their job is to do what the board tells them, we can't and shouldn't assume they know what we want instinctively. These policies are how the board guides the staff. Even if we could assume the staff are psychic, there are still problems with unwritten rules. When an unwritten rule conflicts with a written one, the written one will always take priority, regardless of which is more important. We can't really function with nothing in writing, so it's necessary to put everything in writing.

I was talking in general terms. Yes, the current technical staff are not an issue. Future technical staff, and non-technical staff could be. We don't recruit staff based on their experience with Wikipedia, we recruit them based on their ability to do the job (although experience with Wikipedia is taken into account, I hope). A bad policy is worse than no policy in many cases, yes, but that's why we've been told about this policy while it's at the draft stage. We should be able to help the board put together a good policy.

I live in Belgium, I work on contract for a U.S. subsidiary of China.com. My current project is for a client in the central US time zone, my last was for one in Alaska. If you have the technological infrastructure such as phones and Internet correctly set up then there is no reason people need work in Florida. They can work anywhere, and it has benefits - you become a 24 hour organisation. In fact, in the last four years I've never even known what any of the people I was working with looked like. Brian McNeil

How many of them live in Florida?

Simetrical wrote: "xml:lang". There're some templates, but not too used. They mostly exist to fix browser rendering bugs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Lang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA Tim Starling wrote: I don't see that it really adds anything, but could give problems on strict reading of the letter. When is a format free and when not? Are Pdfs free? Were Gif free when there patents were active because you could create "uncompressed" gifs? Is Djvu if you need propietary software to get efficient compression? [1] Is our content free because i could wget -m en.wikipedia.org ? Are our dumps free just because the content is self-descriptive (ie. i could create my own parser)? Are our dumps equally free without mwdumper (java is free but not usable) as they could be imported (reeaally slowly) with importDump.php? Not that i'm against the spirit of the resolution, but its wording is a troll [2]. See the "Wikimedia logos on Commons" thread on foundation-l about the suposed contradiction between non-free WMF logos and the image resolution [3]. And it doesn't really matter, as it's a non-written rule, and such a change would pass through brion, which is a Foundation employee. Rather a board resolution, i think it would be better as a board recommendation. Just my 2 cents. [1] http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6131#c8 [2] Troll (post) http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/19410

On 9/3/07, Tim Starling &lt;tstarling(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: The word "principles" in your question struck me as important -- we are really talking about broad principles, rather than the need for a specific operational policy. I've reworded and renamed the statement accordingly: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Draft_Statement_of_Principles_Rega… This wording would allow a reasonable amount of flexibility when practically following these principles, and reduce the risk of "rules lawyering" as we've seen with regard to the licensing policy. (Which also addresses Gerard's question regarding fonts: By subscribing to a more flexible set of principles, we can negotiate those details on the operational level.) Why is it important to write down one's principles? There are a few reasons: - Non-technical people will often be involved in decisions with technical implications. If we end up hiring more people for things like program / grants development, then these individuals will have to be aware of the key principles they have to follow when coming up with new projects. - Key people may leave the organization, or be hit by trucks (a well known menace to software developers). Can we ensure that these principles will still be known to apply 5, 10, 20 years from now? We've seen quite substantial changes in the organization's staff in the last few _months__, so this is a very real risk for a small organization. Aside from preserving knowledge, writing down principles reduces the need to re-negotiate them on every turn. - We benefit from sharing our practices with other organizations that have mission overlap. For example, the Encyclopedia of Life is working on a very similar statement of principles regarding both the licensing of their content and the technology they use for the website. - In negotiations with companies that propose certain deals, it's been very helpful for me to be able to point to our licensing policy and say: "These are the rules which we generally follow." Even if broadly phrased, a statement of principles like this would be similarly useful -- it makes it easier to not waste your time. I'd appreciate comments on the new revised statement. -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

The idea of thinking about the future and the enforcing nature of the policy sounds appropriate, may be, just may be, after many years from now, the people working might take an easy route of using proprietary software. always using free things increases the sustainability of a given thing hence the code is always available and any porting/changes needed to make it work can be done without reverse engineering it. I won't mind if a user using IE is faced with a white screen with a link to use firefox :P Yes that is how things should be solved imho providing you have the right guys (you sure have them now :)) --ar:user:alnokta

On 05/09/07, Delphine Ménard &lt;notafishz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It'll lure people in nicely, I think. I think Wikimedia is one of the most significant sites for content in PNG form, for instance. If we can get Greg's player everywhere for Ogg Theora video, that'll make that no-friction, and of course downloaded Theora files play fine in VLC just like downloaded FLVs from YouTube do. Having stuff work properly as best as possible in all browsers is essential (with graceful degradation). Even in Lynx you can download the images. Though having cool stuff (e.g. useful Javascript facilities) that only work in proper browsers (because IE is so horrible to code for - I know so many webmasters who curse IE's stupidities) is an incentive to upgrade, because there's a reward at the end. - d.

Sebastian Moleski wrote: Agreed ! Someone was recently mentionning that openness or kindness were only means to an end. Free licenses, free format, free software are, in my opinion, exactly the same. There are a mean to an end, and this end is "providing free access to knowledge". Being open and kind is one of our values just as freedom is one of our values. It does not mean we should always be 100% open and kind, but we should strive to that, because it is a very good way to collect content, be appreciated, generate a friendly editing environment. It does not mean we should provide content only to those using free software, but if we strive to ourselves provide as much as possible free content using free technology, we know we will ensure the best opportunities to access, modify and reuse the content. Then, if on the way to our goal, our projects make others discover the benefits of being kind, of being open, of using free software etc... then it is a bonus. A very nice bonus. But not *the* goal itself. Ant

Erik Moeller wrote: I am not sure you understand my "open" here in the way I meant it. Did you read the discussion over "values" in the past few days ? Whilst it was in the list of shared values, several people objected that we were not really open, since some types of people are excluded from editing (essentially for not respecting the rules). It may also be argued that restricting page creation to anonymous editors is a "decrease" in openness. My use of the term open here is related to the freedom of participation. Not the freedom of software. ant

Erik Moeller wrote: I do not like the idea of it being a policy. The term "policy" is really too strong. "Statement of principles" is much better. Then, I can list Values, eg Knowledge without boundaries Empowering Pioneering Consideration for others Freedom And link the last one to a couple of places, such as the "Statement of principles regarding software use" and "licensing policy". Considerations for others might link to "privacy policy" for example etc

On 05/09/07, Florence Devouard &lt;Anthere9(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: There's also a bad PR angle - witness the storm (in a teacup) over the proprietary conference phone system software that was put in at the WMF offices. Fortunately, a nonproprietary system was quite feasible instead. That's more of a back office thing than the actual serving of information, but it's still better I think to prefer open source where feasible. Openness of our operational and serving software as far down the stack as reasonably possible is (IMO obviously) needed to keep the knowledge we're here to distribute available to all - which is why our serving infrastructure doesn't include anything in Java unless it also works on a free-software implementation such as gcj. (Which is why lots of people are really really waiting for Sun to finish properly open sourcing Java.) Keeping back office stuff open source where feasible is not as critical, but is still a good idea for all the vendor-independence reasons that the freedom of free software is a good thing, per: http://www.samurajdata.se/opensource/mirror/advocacy/case_for_customers.php So having it as a guideline with "reasonable", "where feasible" in appropriate places is IMO entirely in line with doing what we do properly and well. - d.

2007/9/4, Delphine Ménard &lt;notafishz(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: What about "Other things being equal, content that can be handled by most of the common software packets in its area, both open source and proprietary, is preferred to content that can be handled only by a smaller subset of those." -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels