Hi.
I've read through this thread and I've formulated two questions:
* Is there consensus to specify "font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" in MediaWiki core?
* Is there an issue with specifying "font-family: sans-serif;" in MediaWiki core?
Based on my reading of this thread, associated bug reports, and talk pages, the answer to both of these questions seems to be pretty clearly "no."
There's no consensus currently to specify a non-free font stack and several people on this mailing list (Isarra, bawolff, Chad, Greg G., Bjoern, Martijn, et al.) have now suggested going back to "sans-serif".
Steven and Jon: I would appreciate if the two of you could address these two questions directly. Is there consensus for the changes you two have made? And is there an issue with simply specifying "sans-serif"?
The consistency rationale seems very feeble as Web browsers, operating systems, etc. vary widely and no font stack can adequately address that.
Steven specifically has suggested that changing the default back to "sans-serif" would be disruptive, but I can't fathom what would be disruptive about that. Actively damaging the user experience with these changes _is_ disruptive. Going back to the status quo... not so much.
MZMcBride