Niklas Laxström wrote: I think you're mostly right, though the exact terms of the trade-offs aren't clear here (e.g., "some bandwidth"). We'll need more explicit measurements in order to reach full agreement on what user benefit vs. site performance trade-offs Wikimedia is willing to accept. It's also necessary to hear from the Wikimedia operations team. In addition to end-users weighing the importance of a feature against its cost, the operations team must also make practical considerations. Some Wikimedia wikis get some substantial traffic. ;-) MZMcBride

On Thursday 13 March 2014 08:38 PM, Niklas Laxström wrote: I wonder why people want to serve webfonts by default, eventhough most Wikipedia users don't need it. Webfonts is a nice option, and it must be an option so as if any user or language need it, they can choose it. Overruling a user's / community's settings without asking their opinion is against any freedom WMF represents. There are various other 'real' issues which are affecting, contribution and rendering of Wikimedia wikis in non-latin languages. And requirement of webfonts is also getting smaller and smaller with modern OSs. Even today's mobile OSs have better language support than that of old desktop OSs. Praveen

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Niklas Laxström &lt;niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Me neither; I agree with much of what you are saying. I'm not sure why Odder abandoned <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/115153/> (Odder, I'm sorry if my comments were hurtful for some reason -- and I want to say that I appreciate the fact that you use your technical savvy to help communities make their voices heard in technical forums.) What I was actually going to propose is that the font required by Hebrew Wikisource be loaded unconditionally, for all pages, by being referenced in Common.css. It needs some scrutiny first, but in principle it strikes me as the right way to go. I also think we should consider biting the performance bullet and including a font like Noto <https://code.google.com/p/noto/> on all wikis. Again, not a decision to undertake lightly, but something we should definitely consider. It won't solve the problem of individual wikis needing a font for the content language that is suitable for inputing and editing content, but it may be good enough to cover the cases of occasional content in non-primary scripts on most wikis. I filed < https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59983> about that, though to my regret I did so at the height of the ULS drama so my tone was probably not very inviting to future conversation. But if you can stand to ignore it and to think the issue through, please do comment. And finally: I also absolutely agree with Niklas that there remains a large problem that would not be addressed by either approach, and that a platform like ULS, backed by sufficient data and some trial-and-error experience, represents a good approach for solving that. There is one other thing that I think we should be doing: we should strive to offer the very best HOWTO on the internet for obtaining and installing additional fonts for users, so that we empower to use the internet in their language, not just on Wikimedia (and MediaWiki) wikis, but across the web. If something like that already exists and I am simply an ignorant oaf (which is quite possible) than I eat my hat by way of apology :)