Dear all,

As requested at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Mumbai last weekend by Srikanth, and also in bug 32619[1], Narayam was just enabled on Wikimedia Commons. I hope you find it useful.

During the hackathon we had a lot of help in adding more key mappings to Narayam[2], and we are right now at the Red Hat offices in Pune working together with their localisation team for Indic languages to verify and get feedback for more Indic languages. The recent work may be deployed next Monday (28/11), but it could also be delayed a week. The complete Wikimedia Localisation team is travelling home this weekend, and we haven't reviewed all the code yet, hence the possible delay.

Another exciting feature we are planning on deploying and enabling on many Indic language projects to increase accessibility, and that we would like to have your feedback[3] on is WebFonts[4]. Many languages do not have proper fonts easily available to users. This may be because the operating systems do not ship these fonts, the script has fonts but users don't know from where they will get them from or how to install them in their system. Another reason is because the user is reading the wiki from a shared computer without these fonts. Sometimes it may be because the user does not know how to configure the operating system for a language or the user does not have enough permissions to do this. Because of all these reasons, providing the content in certain languages is problematic. WebFonts sends the fonts with the data and therefore we expect that everybody can see the text correctly.

You can also read more about it in the sheets of my talk at WikiConference India 2011[5]. Gerard Meijssen will soon post a note in all targeted Wikimedia wikis requesting your feedback.

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32619
[2] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/11/typing-made-easier-for-six-languages.html
[3] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/11/webfonts-are-ready-for-your-comments.html
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WCI_2011_Language_Support_in_Wikipedia.pdf

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Siebrand Mazeland
Product Manager Localisation
Wikimedia Foundation

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