[Mediawiki-i18n] Report on WebFonts deployment

[Srikanth Lakshmanan]

Dear all,

First up, some kudos for i18n team for taking up this project to help Indic
communities. I also guess this is probably one of the largest webfonts
deployment till date. We also appreciate the team working overtime last
couple of days for making a quick progress to solve the open issues. We
look forward to better webfonts soon and am eager to get a quality version
of it deployed on Tamil Wikiprojects sooner.

Having said that, we(critics mentioned in above mail) were indeed unhappy
with the enmasse roll out without sufficient testing to a large user base.
I agree that some issues like same origin restriction bug may miss any
amount of testing if its not done on wmf cluster, but certain others could
have been found with more community involvement. I like the concept of
"dark launch" and wish they come sooner and take priority for any and all
future deployments. This will solve the major concern of affecting user
experience of millions of readers while we try to make the software better.
I also look forward to the feedback mechanism update too!

Language support teams :- I know that there was very little support from
the community, (not many,baring us the critics who gave feedback). I have
been hearing the word "Language support teams" for few months now. If
people are not interested to join them, they must be forced to join them(by
way of not supporting them/ deploying any component for the language) so as
to provide better support. If getting contacts is the issue, Shiju should
be able to link people. Deploying things on live which are not certified by
language users is a dangerous thing.

A lot of us are willing to help to get better support for our language and
we hope there shall be more communication. On my part, I will try spending
few hours on #mediawiki-i18n , please feel free to bug me to test anything.

Regards,
Srikanth L

PS: I understand the criticism might have come hard on the India list, but
we(critics) are getting used to a pattern beyond Webfonts. We alert of
something dangerous on the cards, People(mostly WMF) tend to ignore us,
Then they "firefight" and then we criticize more post the entire thing,
"you would have been better had you to listened us". This has happened 3rd
time on row now, other 2 being Protest against Jimbo at WikiConference
India &  IEP. I hope sooner, people take us seriously.
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