Also forgot to tell you. My college uses ONLY systems with Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Most students are from a Tamil background, and they read Tamil websites, Wikipedia very often. On 12/13/11, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak(a)gmail.com> wrote: except just didnt purpose like window, need made). characters / rendering / involved 3 8 work) issues especially serious increasing WebFonts they process). wikiprojects*:- wiki on process. level. merits hope even http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.… -- Regards, Srikanth Ramakrishnan. Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

Have found a few more bugs in testing (other than the ones mentioned in the original mail) 1) Nepali - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33039 2) Sanskrit, Hindi and Nepali - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33038 3) Odiya - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33034 4) Sanskrit, Hindi - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33040 And they keep coming. At this rate me and srikanth should be paid per bug by the WMF. I am yet to touch Assamese, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali or Firefox 4.x, 6.x and IE 6.0, 8.0 and have only began Chrome testing. I am totally wiped for the day and quitting testing. Will try to cover the other cases tomorrow. Two thoughts at the end of a long day: i) To i18n team: Instead of launching a such a buggy code, that too as a compulsory and default option for all users, why not listen to feedback and do proper testing?. Testing is always better than firefighting. Its never too late, roll back this "soft launch", form language teams, test this for a few weeks thoroughly and then do project by project launches. ii)To Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit, Oriya, Marathi, Assamese and Bengali folks on this list. Spread the word and test, test, test. File bug reports. This needs thorough testing in all OSes/browsers/connections by people who know the language. Learn from this experience and dont accept any untested products. Mayur has reported in one of the bugs that hi wiki users are reporting strange issues and has suggested making webfonts optional [1] A few weeks back i tried to warn the communities not to accept webfonts without proper testing. [2] What i feared has come to pass. Probably should have posted in all village pumps. ==Links== [1]https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33024 [2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.… On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan < parakara.ghoda(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

hi, Curious: Is anybody testing this for mobile web? Shiju's report last week suggested an increase in traffic via mobile web, I think. I have started trying to read ml.wiki on my cell pointing my phone browser at ml.m.wikipedia.org and all I get are boxes right now. I'm using Opera Mini browser on a Nokia E63. Pradeep Handheld On 14/12/2011, Bala Jeyaraman &lt;sodabottle(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: the https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33040 am other and for bug accept http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.… as help WMF by of could those was in Firefox cannot IE this up been being an / work in for http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.… -- Pradeep Mohandas How Pradeep uses email - http://goo.gl/6v1I9 _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

Hi, Due to my ongoing wikihiatus, I haven't followed much of discussions in this list. But, I'm interested in this issue because I was following and supporting the original request filed by User:SanthoshGuru asking for such a support in 2005.[1] While I welcome the recent energy in building and launching solutions for Indic languages by WMF. However, like Srikanth and Bala have mentioned, we should ensure that we don't break the experience of thousands of readers visiting the wikis everyday. The situation is very different now than in 2005. So, let us take care to test every new launch tested out in translatewiki before rolling out. We can perhaps create a rollout routine to include a thumbs-up from some community volunteers. Regards, Sundar [1] - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2361 "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted." - George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture ------------------------------ *From:* Srikanth Lakshmanan &lt;srik.lak(a)gmail.com&gt; *To:* Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia. < wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; *Sent:* Tuesday, December 13, 2011 9:17 PM *Subject:* [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects Hi all, Pardon for a long mail, just unavoidable. We have seen the WebFonts roll out[0] last night to most Indic wikis except Malayalam and Tamil. We in Tamil Community felt WebFonts extension is just not ready for us. We would like to share on why we in Tamil community didnt chose webfonts and also what could work better in future for Indic communities during technology adoption. 1. *Unavailability of "Quality Free fonts"* :- During the development, our request for not setting the default font as a lower quality font was rejected citing "it will defeat the purpose of extension".[1] The available fonts had issues and deploying the extension with those low quality fonts to everyone would not only defeat the purpose of extension, but also gives Tamil Wikipedia a bad image when people just cant read the fonts even though they had better fonts in system. (Just like how i18n team says people who see boxes will just simply close the window, we say giving these poor fonts will also lead to same thing and not help the cause, instead will also hurt those who have better fonts.). 2. *Quality of User Experience* :- We are a smaller wiki, we have a smaller reader base, but still we are ranked 7th most visited website in Tamil according to alexa[2]. Just like how no-nonsense / no-mediocrity is tolerated in any code that enters WMF cluster, any change which will affect the site's look and feel, user experience will have to be of highest standards and must be accepted by community. WebFonts were just not ready to enter Wikipedia, since it changes the UX for all the readers to help a potentially lower number of users who dont have Tamil fonts than the current existing reader base. *What we feel was wrong in WebFonts deployment* We have also been seeing the wikis where they have been rolled out and reporting issues. We ourselves are reporting issues inspite of not taking WebFonts, with the hope software just gets better and some day we can deploy them. Dont get us wrong, we are not against technology, we just need it in better form and are not in any urgency. (After all we at Ta wiki initiated an RFC and asked Webfonts even before the announcement was made). We would also like to mention some points which we feel i18n team could have done better for a smoother launch. 1. *Font Testing* :- The point of language support team is that the people who are aware of language give feedback to make any software better supported for the language. We are not sure if Font-Testing was ever done at all for those languages where the WebFonts were deployed. The hinting issue which was a concern and made us raise against deployment in Tamil is also present in Hindi,Sanskrit,Telugu(atleast till we saw) and gave the same worst readability. The i18n team did font assessment[3], testing only 1 word to test the font. Can any font be tested with just rendering of 4 characters / 1 word? For Tamil,we did a test in little more comprehensive way(We would not say its complete)[4]. This should have been a *must* to see rendering / font issues with chosen default font especially since the fonts are being set default to every single user to the site. Sadly community was involved the least, a note was posted in Village pumps and we dont think community involved itself in any testing and poor quality was eventually pushed without proper testing. 2. *Real world testing* :- Though cross browser testing was done, there was a severe lack of real world testing and as a result we are seeing a host of issues being discovered post launch. Average PC in India might have 1 GB RAM, Firefox 3 / 4, worse IE 5.5 / IE6 on 100 Kbps semi-broadband connection. We cannot tell them move to latest or ignore them. More care should have been taken especially since the webfonts is bound to set a default font. With only a few hours of testing serious issues have been found - in IE 8 where webfonts might be rolled back [5], IE 7.0 (where webfonts dont work) [6] , ubuntu + Firefox (fixed now) [7] and Win+Firefox 5.0, [8]. We are still testing for other browsers and usecases and dont know how many issues we will discover. In short - This code is not ready to go live, especially when it is being made default compulsorily for everyone. There are serious performance issues for typical Indian internet connections as well.[9] 3. *Communication and Community Engagement* :- Most of the above things could have solved earlier if there was more communication and community engagement. We asked for more information, engagement on this very list. There was no reply to the mail on increasing community engagement for i18n projects[10]. Most communities know WebFonts is coming on Dec 12, didnt know what was coming, any further details. Worse, Even Indic Consultant was not having clear information. Why this lack of transparency? Community is more than willing to help, if only they are informed. Even though we did not take up WebFonts, we have spent time to help making it better. And the end users in the wikis dont know where to report and follow up issues. (Not everyone is aware of and familiar with the Bugzilla process). The request we raised to have a visible bug reporting link has not been acted upon [11]. There might be a lot of issues going unreported, because people dont know whom to report to. When a change of this scale is being done, Community admins must be advised to run Sitenotice campaigns to inform the users about the change with some solid newbie oriented documentation. Infact this must be done for RFC itself, so as to make an informed decision. We did the same for RFC in Tamil[12]. *Proposal for Future i18n / any special deployments to Indic wikiprojects*:- The WebFonts deployment is a classic example of making deployment without enough community engagement. Can this done in any of English / German / Russian wikipedia which have a strong community? The fact that Tamil / Malayalam resisted was because the community had concerns over the solution. Till an hour before deployment yesterday, we did not know if Ta wiki projects will get webfonts despite our objections. We had been pursuing Siebrand and Gerard across forums - facebook, twitter, meta talk pages, village pumps, gmail chat etc looking for answers. But till the deployment happened, we had no clue what we would be getting. This method of deploying in silence *must* stop ASAP. Any deployment to any Indic wiki must go through the community (language support teams) informed of the change with Indic Consultant kept in loop. We suggest Shiju Alex to work on a policy and put it in place regarding this. If there is problem identifying community members to help, we are sure Shiju will help connecting. Irrespective of that happening Tamil Wiki Projects will follow this process. 1. Test any deployment on translatewiki 2. File Bugs and verify in translatewiki till it reaches acceptable level. 3. Language support team member will make a RFC page explaining the merits / demerits of the technology in simple terms with use of screenshots / external links 4. Reverify / Ask for deployment in largely-inactive Wikiprojects like WikiQuote / WikiBooks *post community concensus* 5. Test again / File Bugs 6. Reverify / Ask for deployment Wikiprojects next in line in terms of activity ( Wiktionary / Wikinews/ Wikisource) 7. Test again / File Bugs 8. Only after ironing out all issues, any deployment will be allowed in Tamil Wikipedia. We had burnt our fingers during Narayam deployment already once and community was so resistive of Narayam itself and was asking to go back to older javascript solution. After that we followed the above process for bringing back Narayam on all Tamil Wikiprojects. We suggest the other communities adopt something similar. We sincerely hope that the community engagement is improved, not just before deployment, even from start of development. [0] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/12/going-live-december-12-2011/ [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/30506 [2] http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/World/Tamil [3] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/WebFonts_assessment [4] http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:Sodabottle/test1 [5] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32775 [6] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33024 [7] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33025 [8] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33018 [9] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/33027 [10] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.… [11] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942 [12] http://tawp.in/r/2r1f -- Regards Bala Jeyaraman & Srikanth.L _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-i18n/2011-December/000361.ht… > > "In order to force them, "if you don't test this it may break horribly > for you when deployed" seems way more convincing than "no new goodies > for you"." > > This attitude of i18n is not only very dangerous for the communities and > languages but also very unprofessional.

them(by way of not supporting them/ deploying any component for the language) so as to provide better support."

. Nothing that breaks horrible must ever be deployed. We safeguarded Tamil(Malayalam folks did theirs too), we frankly didnt care much for others before the launch.

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.

I dont think its appropriate to be a bit more experimental. You are seeing the scale in absolute sense, we are seeing it in relative sense. Tamil Wikipedia is 7th most-viewed Tamil site.

If you want to test something new, either make it opt in, or don't do it live. Not on Tamil, not on Hindi, not on any Wikipedia for that matter. On 12/14/11, Ravishankar &lt;ravidreams(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: seeing -- Regards, Srikanth Ramakrishnan. Wikipedia Coimbatore Meetup on December 10th. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Coimbatore _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 8:49 AM, Praveen Prakash &lt;me.praveen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Praveen Do you mean this bug ? https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29005 The bug speaks itself . From a quick reading I felt what you were asking is to use not properly forked font projects in webfonts, when santhosh took a stand to use fonts them from upstream. On Normalization of characters, it is an optional feature, for visibility of some chillus , that can be disabled in user settings if needed. It perfectly makes sense for me, since dual encoding is an issue in Malayalam , and the fix need to be on Unicode . The Webfonts hack is just a positive step and optional fix to ensure, people will not be missed from accessing knowledge in wikipedia , based on browser restrictions. Anivar -- "[It is not] possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and 'nonnumerical' algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information." - Donald Knuth _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

Praveen Prakash +1 On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 09:46, Praveen Prakash &lt;me.praveen(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 07:33, Subhashish Panigrahi &lt;psubhashish(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Welcome to the world finally! Go read the bug[1] for a start. In summary i18n team feels the purpose of extension gets defeated if its not set as default. I tried convincing them for days it wont get defeated, but this is a PoV debate and solution remains at heart :). If you feel having the default fonts with hinting issue will affect many more people than it would benefit(In case of Tamil it was over 10x), then file a bug for removing WebFonts for or wp. But what next? 2 options. 1. If fonts are bad and have hinting issues, {{SOFIXIT}} . Suggest to Santhosh what are the issues, where it could get better, he will try his best and do as much as he can do. We did the same for Tamil, Lohit-Tamil is improved than what upstream gave, but there is a limitation here as to how much Santhosh can help since he is not a professional typographer and you may not be satisfied very much with font even after the exercise (like we are). There is also delivery issue which needs to be sorted if we are going to go this way since Win 7, most linux OS dont have hinting issue but win xp has it. 2. Get more free fonts. Look out for other free(ly licensed) fonts, convince people to release fonts under free license.Create a new font(Easier said than done,but its not Impossible). Beg,Borrow (no Steal doesnt apply here :D, Acquire probably applies in case money is only thing stopping, then a reasonable grant request might help). In short get alternative fonts which can be used. [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31936#c2 -- Regards Srikanth.L

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 10:45 PM, Bala Jeyaraman &lt;sodabottle(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: more decided to 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l