[Wikimediaindia-l] OT FOSS assist WAS Re: 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

Malayalam and Tamil. We in Tamil Community felt WebFonts extension is

not ready for us. We would like to share on why we in Tamil community

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

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

how i18n team says people who see boxes will just simply close the

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

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

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

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

font issues with chosen default font especially since the fonts are being set default to every single user to the site. Sadly community was

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

/ 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

where webfonts might be rolled back [5], IE 7.0 (where webfonts dont

[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

we will discover. In short - This code is not ready to go live,

when it is being made default compulsorily for everyone. There are

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

community engagement for i18n projects[10]. Most communities know

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

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

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

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

must go through the community (language support teams) informed of the change with Indic Consultant kept in loop. We suggest Shiju Alex to work

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

1. Test any deployment on translatewiki 2. File Bugs and verify in translatewiki till it reaches acceptable

3. Language support team member will make a RFC page explaining the

/ 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

that the community engagement is improved, not just before deployment,

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]

[11] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942 [12] http://tawp.in/r/2r1f -- Regards Bala Jeyaraman & Srikanth.L