On Apr 9, 2014 2:02 PM, "Steven Walling" steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
It's pretty clear that the objectives of this project are not
successfully
met at this point, and in fact have caused major problems on non-Latin script WMF sites, and significant but less critical problems on Latin script sites. Several factors for this have been identified in the
thread -
including limited attention to the effects on non-Latin script projects, the insertion of philosophical principles (FOSS) without a clear understanding of the effects this would have on the outcome, and the unwillingness to step back when a major change results in loss of functionality.
[citation needed]
Loss of functionality? The functionality we're talking about here is reading of Wikimedia content. It's the most core, most basic functionality we have. In the case of VisualEditor, which picks up read-mode typography styles, it's also editing.
Did reading suddenly become seriously impaired? No.
Yes, it was seriously impaired. On the scale of impairments possible with a font stack change, compared to how it was, this change was in the high end of the scale, next to broken.
I currently visit a lot of language pedias doing category linking on wikidata, and after the change I noticed many had obviously bad font issues that I didnt see the day before. Clicking random on a few wikis would have been enough testing to work that out.
Btw that was using Chrome on Fedora Core 19 without any local mods to font handling.
The functionality was previously fine. Maybe it could be improved, but that isnt what happened.
I agree with everything Risker said. I go further and suggest the team involved stops defending their goals and implementation. The former are not the issue, and the latter was indefensible. I havent looked at how much testing was done, or if there was some staging of the rollout, but it is clear that it wasnt careful enough.
-- John