[Anubad] Fwd: [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects

Tue Dec 13 22:27:34 PST 2011

Not specifically pertaining to ankur.org.in but a required discussion
nonetheless.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:17 PM
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] Webfonts deployment on Indic Wikiprojects
To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia."
<wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

Hi all,

Pardon for a long mail, just unavoidable.

We have seen the WebFonts roll out[0] last night to most Indic wikis
except Malayalam and Tamil. We in Tamil Community felt WebFonts
extension is just not ready for us. We would like to share on why we
in Tamil community didnt 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 purpose 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 like how i18n team says people who see boxes
will just simply close the window, 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 need 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 made). 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 characters / 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 rendering / font issues with chosen default
font especially since the fonts are being set default to every single
user to the site. Sadly community was involved 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 3 / 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 8 where webfonts might be rolled back [5], IE 7.0 (where webfonts
dont work) [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 issues we will discover. In short - This code is
not ready to go live, especially when it is being made default
compulsorily for everyone. There are serious 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
increasing community engagement for i18n projects[10]. Most
communities know WebFonts 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 they 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
process). 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 wikiprojects :-

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

1. Test any deployment on translatewiki
2. File Bugs and verify in translatewiki till it reaches acceptable level.
3. Language support team member will make a RFC page explaining the
merits / 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
hope that the community engagement is improved, not just before
deployment, even 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] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-November/005153.html
[11] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32942
[12] http://tawp.in/r/2r1f

--
Regards
Bala Jeyaraman & Srikanth.L

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<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>