I am going to be annoying and answer your question with a question:
consensus among who? How do make a decision like this?
On the one hand, you have Wikimedia users, who don't really care about the
appearance of promoting FOSS or not.
[Citation needed]. User's aren't one person, but quite a varied group.
However I believe a lot of them care about promoting FOSS. Just look
at the MP4 RFC. Obviously not all Wikimedia users voted in that
(especially if you're including non-editors in the user category), but
a significant chunk did.
After all, we are talking about a project, where people, out of the
goodness of the heart spend their time writing high quality
educational articles without compensation. I would imagine that a good
portion (not all) of the types of people attracted to doing this are
also the type of people who would be attracted to the ideals of the
FOSS movements.
They just want to things to work and
look good.
Well yes. Don't we all?
They also believe that the only consensus that matters
is the
one on their local wiki.
To be fair, they don't really have an opportunity to participate in a
larger consensus.
On the other hand, we have MediaWiki developers, some of whom would rather
throw up their hands and not specify a real font stack,
Well that's an antagonistic way of phrasing it.
By the same count, MediaWiki developers would rather throw up their
hands then make #expr accept localized numbers (bug 30318), or any
other of the thousands of WONTFIXed bugs.
rather than touch
the non-free fonts *most users already have* with a ten foot pole.
Whether or not the non-free fonts are installed on the users system
seems irrelavent to the concerns that the non-free font crowd have
raised.
There's a big difference between saying "Do whatever you think is
best" compared to "Do X if possible", even if both statements evaluate
to doing the same action.
They
seem to think that an RFC or discussion on Wikitech-l is what represents a
consensus that must be respected.
I'm not sure if people actually think that (or if they do think that,
that they actually said that). One person (MZMcBride) implied that
kind of heavily, most of the other "revert"-ish threads are not using
the "because concensus (or lack thereof) on wikitech-l" as an
argument.
There is a historical precedent for development decisions being made
not by consensus, but by a developer hierarchy (e.g. people like
Brion or Tim making final calls). Now a days it seems like things have
shifted more to managers at WMF make the decisions. How controversial
decisions are decided in our community is a complex topic unto itself.
I'm not even sure what the current best practise is, to be honest.
And they don't feel responsible for what
gets released on Wikimedia sites necessarily.
I strongly dispute that statement. If they didn't care, this thread
wouldn't be here.
In essence, the controversy is a bunch of people saying: I feel
responsible for what gets released on Wikimedia sites, and I believe
that the problems of TR don't outweight the benefits, or that it
otherwise doesn't meet the high standard of what normally gets
released, etc
We can gain more consistent, accessible typography across languages with an
iterative approach that continues to build on what we've done over the last
five months. Or we can go back to the drawing board to try and please
everyone, which is an impossibility if you ever want to make progress.
Sorry to put this so bluntly, but to be frank, its debatable whether
this actually represents "progress".
--bawolff