Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Denis Jacquerye moy...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe I haven't looked in the right place, but why aren’t webfonts being considered? Webfonts would mean the same fonts can be delivered everywhere, relying on installed font only as a last resort. There are more options than just the 4 fonts mentioned (DejaVu Serif, Nimbus Roman No9 L, Linux Libertine, Liberation Sans): PT Sans/PT Serif, Droid Sans/Droid Serif and likes (Open Sans, Noto), the other Liberation fonts and likes (Arimo, Tinos), Source Sans, Roboto, Ubuntu, Clear Sans, if you just want hinted fonts and household names. I’ll also point out that Georgia is a great font originally designed for small size, and Helvetica Neue/Helvetica/Arial was originally designed for display. When it comes to language coverage both are lacking but that cannot be fixed easily. To add on to what Jared said... On webfonts: it's not just that it would take more research. We have already tried webfonts and failed miserably so far. UniversalLanguageSelector is an example of how even the most well-intentioned efforts in this area can face serious setbacks. Keep in mind also that this typography work is largely being done with volunteer or side project time from myself, the developers, and most of the designers. We are simply not prepared to implement and test a webfonts system to work at Wikipedia scale. There are many gorgeous, well-localized free fonts out there... but few that meet our design goals are delivered universally in popular mobile and desktop operating systems. We can't get a consistent and more readable experience without delivering those as webfonts, and webfonts are not practically an option open to us right now. Maybe in the future we will get (as Jared says) a foundry to donate a custom free font for us, or maybe we'll just use a gorgeous free font out there now, like Open Baskerville or Open Sans. For now, however, we get the following result from the Typography Refresh beta feature: 1. the vast majority of our 500 billion or more users get a more readable experience 2. we unify the typography across mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing for both Wikimedia and third party users of Vector/MobileFrontEnd 3. individual users and individual wikis can still change their CSS as needed and desired 4. we don't jeopardize Vector and MediaWiki's status as FOSS, by not distributing nor creating a dependency on any proprietary software *whatsoever*. Thank you, CSS font-family property and fallbacks. That all sounds like a pretty good way to maintain freedom while improving readability and consistency to me. -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
Hoi, You say we have failed miserably. Many fonts are mentioned and they are all for the Latin script. Many fonts are mentioned and you fail to mention the Open Dyslexic font. I know from personal experience that Open Dyslexic makes a difference in being able to read Wikipedia [1]. We know that many people who want to write in their own language need web fonts and input methods to do this in the internet cafes where they write their articles. This proves the point that webfonts does what it is there for; provide an ability where there is none. This whole huha of providing font support for the Latin script is stupid unless a font does NOT support the characters needed to show a particular language and YES most fonts are incomplete when they are to support all of the Latin script. Working towards a more beautiful viewing experience is a secondary objective. Primary is that our readers and editors can read and edit. ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid that we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about. Thanks, GerardM [1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2013/12/the-best-sinterklaas-gift-ever.html On 16 February 2014 09:13, Steven Walling swall...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Denis Jacquerye moy...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe I haven't looked in the right place, but why aren’t webfonts being considered? Webfonts would mean the same fonts can be delivered everywhere, relying on installed font only as a last resort. There are more options than just the 4 fonts mentioned (DejaVu Serif, Nimbus Roman No9 L, Linux Libertine, Liberation Sans): PT Sans/PT Serif, Droid Sans/Droid Serif and likes (Open Sans, Noto), the other Liberation fonts and likes (Arimo, Tinos), Source Sans, Roboto, Ubuntu, Clear Sans, if you just want hinted fonts and household names. I’ll also point out that Georgia is a great font originally designed for small size, and Helvetica Neue/Helvetica/Arial was originally designed for display. When it comes to language coverage both are lacking but that cannot be fixed easily. To add on to what Jared said... On webfonts: it's not just that it would take more research. We have already tried webfonts and failed miserably so far. UniversalLanguageSelector is an example of how even the most well-intentioned efforts in this area can face serious setbacks. Keep in mind also that this typography work is largely being done with volunteer or side project time from myself, the developers, and most of the designers. We are simply not prepared to implement and test a webfonts system to work at Wikipedia scale. There are many gorgeous, well-localized free fonts out there... but few that meet our design goals are delivered universally in popular mobile and desktop operating systems. We can't get a consistent and more readable experience without delivering those as webfonts, and webfonts are not practically an option open to us right now. Maybe in the future we will get (as Jared says) a foundry to donate a custom free font for us, or maybe we'll just use a gorgeous free font out there now, like Open Baskerville or Open Sans. For now, however, we get the following result from the Typography Refresh beta feature: 1. the vast majority of our 500 billion or more users get a more readable experience 2. we unify the typography across mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing for both Wikimedia and third party users of Vector/MobileFrontEnd 3. individual users and individual wikis can still change their CSS as needed and desired 4. we don't jeopardize Vector and MediaWiki's status as FOSS, by not distributing nor creating a dependency on any proprietary software *whatsoever*. Thank you, CSS font-family property and fallbacks. That all sounds like a pretty good way to maintain freedom while improving readability and consistency to me. -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/ ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On 16 February 2014 08:54, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Working towards a more beautiful viewing experience is a secondary objective. Primary is that our readers and editors can read and edit. ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid that we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about. Indeed. What precisely was the problem with ULS? What consideration did the designers give to non-Latin? - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visual Editor and Parsoid New Pages in Wikitext?
On 15 February 2014 20:05, Daniel Kinzler dan...@brightbyte.de wrote: Am 14.02.2014 22:39, schrieb Gabriel Wicke: VisualEditor is an HTML editor and doesn't know about wikitext. All conversions between wikitext and HTML are done by Parsoid. You need Parsoid if you want to use VisualEditor on current wikis. Implementing a HTML content type in mediawiki would be pretty trivial. That way, a page could natively contain HTML, with no need of conversion. Anyone up to doing it?... There are extensions that allow raw HTML widgets, just putting them through unchecked. The hard part will be checking. Note that the rawness of the somewhat-filtered HTML is a part of WordPress's not so great security story (though they've had a lot less update now! in the past year). So, may not involve much less parsing. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visual Editor and Parsoid New Pages in Wikitext?
On 14 February 2014 23:40, Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se wrote: What do you predict we will be using five years from now, in 2019? Plain old wikitext, VisualEditor, or some other path? I would hope Wikitext had been stabbed through its black and twisted little heart, or at least as much as one can reasonably do that with ~5 billion words of legacy content. Horrible, horrible thing. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visual Editor and Parsoid New Pages in Wikitext?
On 15 February 2014 08:06, Matthew Flaschen mflasc...@wikimedia.org wrote: If you look at the HTML source code of http://parsoid.wmflabs.org/enwiki/Earth , you can see that while it is HTML, it is carefully augmented with additional information. Currently giving Error: EROFS, read-only file system :-) - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 1:16 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 February 2014 08:54, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Working towards a more beautiful viewing experience is a secondary objective. Primary is that our readers and editors can read and edit. ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid that we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about. Indeed. What precisely was the problem with ULS? From https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector: Universal Language Selector has been disabled on 21-01-2014 to work out some performance issues that had affected the Wikimedia sites. To my understanding part of the major performance issues here related to issues like loading the Autonym font via webfonts. I probably should not have brought up ULS because feelings are still raw about it and I'm not interested in rehashing its problems, but my point is that it's an example of how delivering webfonts is not a trivial thing for us. No one has offered to spend time on a highly performant webfonts system that can deliver better typography reliably to all Wikimedia sites, and we're certainly not going to officially task a team to do so when there's a reasonable alternative that thousands of users are trying out right now in beta mode. What consideration did the designers give to non-Latin? The beta feature has involved lots of testing in non-Latin scripts. It's not perfect yet but we certainly haven't ignored scripts that represent so many users. (Remember we're not talking about something actually that new. A very similar font stack has been in use for 100% of mobile users for more than a year.) Steven P.S. Sorry for answering from a different account. My work address is not subscribed to Wikitech. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
Hoi, Loading the Autonym stack was a solution to a much worse problem. When it is still a problem, it can easily be disabled because having the Autonym font is not essential. It is there to make things look good. Having the OpenDyslexic font is essential. Having the fonts for Hindi, Divehi, Tamil, Amharic is essential. OpenDyslexic is easily the most used WebFont. It has the potential to serve 7% of a population. When you indicate that the feelings are still high, you have to appreciate that no recent changes lead to the disabling of primary functionality. There may have been performance issues but they were there before. The argument was not made that in order to save our infrastructure ULS had to be disabled. The argument that was made was we want to improve the performance of our site. I do agree that this is important. It is not as important as providing ability to read and edit. I do agree that delivering web fonts is not trivial. However the non technical arguments have been trivialised. Thanks, GerardM On 16 February 2014 10:48, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 1:16 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 February 2014 08:54, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Working towards a more beautiful viewing experience is a secondary objective. Primary is that our readers and editors can read and edit. ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid that we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about. Indeed. What precisely was the problem with ULS? From https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector: Universal Language Selector has been disabled on 21-01-2014 to work out some performance issues that had affected the Wikimedia sites. To my understanding part of the major performance issues here related to issues like loading the Autonym font via webfonts. I probably should not have brought up ULS because feelings are still raw about it and I'm not interested in rehashing its problems, but my point is that it's an example of how delivering webfonts is not a trivial thing for us. No one has offered to spend time on a highly performant webfonts system that can deliver better typography reliably to all Wikimedia sites, and we're certainly not going to officially task a team to do so when there's a reasonable alternative that thousands of users are trying out right now in beta mode. What consideration did the designers give to non-Latin? The beta feature has involved lots of testing in non-Latin scripts. It's not perfect yet but we certainly haven't ignored scripts that represent so many users. (Remember we're not talking about something actually that new. A very similar font stack has been in use for 100% of mobile users for more than a year.) Steven P.S. Sorry for answering from a different account. My work address is not subscribed to Wikitech. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
Ryan Kaldari, 16/02/2014 06:54: Now that I've blamed everyone except for myself, I would like to suggest that we stop pointing fingers and get down to brass tacks. Brad's email was a bit caustic but IMHO it wasn't pointing fingers, unlike yours (though you helpfully pointed fingers towards everyone). ;-) My question for both the designers and the free font advocates is: Are there any free fonts that are... 1. widely installed (at least on Linux systems) 2. easily readable and not distractingly ugly 3. would not be mapped to by the existing stack anyway (i.e. are not simply clones or substitutes for popular commercial fonts) I'm sorry but this question to the free font advocates does not make sense and I refuse to accept it, for two reasons: 1) is not a given or an immutable law of physics, it's the designers' job to assess: if you really care for a specific font you serve it; if you don't want to serve fonts, then design must adapt to availability and not the opposite; 2) is again the designers' job, I have no idea how one assesses easily readable* and I'd like us to banish personal opinions including adjectives like strange or ugly from any and all design decision;** moreover, if feedback had ever been desired on font choices, we would have a document explaining what this mythical style desired by the designers actually is, other than the superlunar ideal no human MediaWiki commentator can sense and comment. So again, I'm waiting for documentation. Whoever refrains from publishing documentation, research, design documents etc. as soon as they are produced prevents iterations and feedback from happening and hence takes full personal responsibility of whatever outcome of the process, begging to be personally blamed. Nemo (*) In my very biased and personal experience of a Latin alphabet languages reader, readable equals serif so that I can tell I from l etc., and DejaVu serif is the most beautiful font ever because it covers so many characters. (**) I'm really hearing them too often. They are suppressors of discussion/rational discourse and polarise discussions unnecessarily. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IDONTLIKEIT. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
hi steven, ryan, thank you so much for jumping in here. could you please elaborate a little on and in a more structured way: 1. why a change is needed? 2. what are the problems with webfonts? 3. why ubuntu (or replace it with any other free font) is not good enough? 4. why there is no budget to solve it proper, is so many are concerned? 5. what are your design goals? 6. who are the designers? references to some free fonts: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(typeface) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino (urw palladio l and descendants) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDyslexic best regards, rupert On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.comwrote: Ryan Kaldari, 16/02/2014 06:54: Now that I've blamed everyone except for myself, I would like to suggest that we stop pointing fingers and get down to brass tacks. Brad's email was a bit caustic but IMHO it wasn't pointing fingers, unlike yours (though you helpfully pointed fingers towards everyone). ;-) My question for both the designers and the free font advocates is: Are there any free fonts that are... 1. widely installed (at least on Linux systems) 2. easily readable and not distractingly ugly 3. would not be mapped to by the existing stack anyway (i.e. are not simply clones or substitutes for popular commercial fonts) I'm sorry but this question to the free font advocates does not make sense and I refuse to accept it, for two reasons: 1) is not a given or an immutable law of physics, it's the designers' job to assess: if you really care for a specific font you serve it; if you don't want to serve fonts, then design must adapt to availability and not the opposite; 2) is again the designers' job, I have no idea how one assesses easily readable* and I'd like us to banish personal opinions including adjectives like strange or ugly from any and all design decision;** moreover, if feedback had ever been desired on font choices, we would have a document explaining what this mythical style desired by the designers actually is, other than the superlunar ideal no human MediaWiki commentator can sense and comment. So again, I'm waiting for documentation. Whoever refrains from publishing documentation, research, design documents etc. as soon as they are produced prevents iterations and feedback from happening and hence takes full personal responsibility of whatever outcome of the process, begging to be personally blamed. Nemo (*) In my very biased and personal experience of a Latin alphabet languages reader, readable equals serif so that I can tell I from l etc., and DejaVu serif is the most beautiful font ever because it covers so many characters. (**) I'm really hearing them too often. They are suppressors of discussion/rational discourse and polarise discussions unnecessarily. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IDONTLIKEIT. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] non-Latin
[private reply] 2014-02-16 11:48 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com: What consideration did the designers give to non-Latin? The beta feature has involved lots of testing in non-Latin scripts. Which non-Latin scripts? Where can I see the results? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On 16 February 2014 18:54, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid that we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about. Thanks, GerardM TBH we probably lost most of that when everything was rolled into one gigantic extensions, instead of separate tools that specialised in what they were designed for. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] non-Latin
[It was meant as a private, but not really secret, reply on the Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts thread to reduce traffic a bit. Sorry about the confusion.] -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2014-02-16 12:22 GMT+02:00 Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il: [private reply] 2014-02-16 11:48 GMT+02:00 Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com: What consideration did the designers give to non-Latin? The beta feature has involved lots of testing in non-Latin scripts. Which non-Latin scripts? Where can I see the results? -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
Hoi, That may seem like a reasonable argument however, the functionality that ULS provides is related. What is the point of providing input methods when changes are that you can not read what you are about to write. What is the point when you cannot select the language you want to use this font, input method for? Before ULS, in the bad old times, There was a need for both the font and the input method.. Really, we are much better off with the ULS. Thanks, Gerard PS honest mistake I take it. On 16 February 2014 11:35, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 February 2014 18:54, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: ULS is a huge success in doing what it was intended to do. I am afraid that we have lost sight of what our primary objective is about. Thanks, GerardM TBH we probably lost most of that when everything was rolled into one gigantic extensions, instead of separate tools that specialised in what they were designed for. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] February '14 appreciation thread
Greetings, On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 8:45 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski tom...@twkozlowski.net wrote: So, if you'd like to thank someone, now is a good time and opportunity to do so! I'd like to thank: * Tomasz Kozlowski / odder for all his amazing work on Tech News (OMG appreciation loop!); * Kunal Mehta / Legoktm for developing MassMessage, and MZMcBride for maintaining EdwardsBot before that; * Translators who relentlessly translate Tech news into a dozen languages every week-end; * Niklas Laxström and Siebrand Mazeland for developing the Translate extension, which has made content translation so much easier; * Community liaisons, tech ambassadors and LCA staff for voluntarily serving as 2-way lightning rods between users and developers; * Everyone who has ever added an item to Tech news; * Last but not least, Wikimedia employees for patiently enduring my monthly poking every time the engineering report needs to be put together. -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visual Editor and Parsoid New Pages in Wikitext?
That is due to Wikimedia Labs currently having a small NFS issue. Addshore On 16 February 2014 10:34, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 15 February 2014 08:06, Matthew Flaschen mflasc...@wikimedia.org wrote: If you look at the HTML source code of http://parsoid.wmflabs.org/enwiki/Earth , you can see that while it is HTML, it is carefully augmented with additional information. Currently giving Error: EROFS, read-only file system :-) - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Visual Editor and Parsoid New Pages in Wikitext?
On 02/16/2014 01:32 AM, David Gerard wrote: There are extensions that allow raw HTML widgets, just putting them through unchecked. The hard part will be checking. Note that the rawness of the somewhat-filtered HTML is a part of WordPress's not so great security story (though they've had a lot less update now! in the past year). So, may not involve much less parsing. The difference is that you can run the sanitizer on save, and then only need to re-run it when a bug in it was fixed (which can happen in a background job rather than on view). We will maintain a sanitization level in storage to track the degree to which the HTML is sanitized. Sanitization is also the last part of parsing from wikitext to HTML. It is one of the cheapest parts of the parsing process, so running just that on a DOM is much cheaper than parsing from scratch. Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Design] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On 02/15/2014 09:54 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: Now that I've blamed everyone except for myself, I would like to suggest that we stop pointing fingers and get down to brass tacks. My question for both the designers and the free font advocates is: Are there any free fonts that are... 1. widely installed (at least on Linux systems) 2. easily readable and not distractingly ugly 3. would not be mapped to by the existing stack anyway (i.e. are not simply clones or substitutes for popular commercial fonts) I have been very happy with the crisp rendering and screen-optimized shape of DejaVu Sans selected as the default sans-serif font on Debian Linux. At a given size it is about as readable as Verdana while looking (to my eyes at least) more elegant. DejaVu Sans has a fairly good unicode coverage by itself, and in my limited experience fontconfig picks good other fonts for rare scripts. I have not seen any tofu on Linux in a long time. The rendering of the font refresh beta on my Linux box seems to be Helvetica without subpixel rendering (blurry), which is a real regression from the status quo. I am not entirely sure that there is actually a problem to solve on an average Linux desktop installation, but am willing to be convinced otherwise with a documentation of the issues encountered. Some of the limitations you are trying to address seem to be platform-specific. Could we address those in a targeted way without making things worse for other platforms? Gabriel ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.orgwrote:
That's not quite accurate. The new font stack is based on feedback from
Linux users who preferred that we take advantage of the font-mapping built
into Linux rather than trying to guess arbitrary fonts that may or may not
be installed on their machine.
And ignoring the feedback from users who would rather see free fonts
explicitly supported?
Helvetica, Times, etc. are not non-free
software, they are names of well-established (non-copyrighted) typefaces
Considering that typefaces aren't eligible for copyright in the US,[1]
that's not saying anything.
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces
We're trying to balance the requirements of the designers
I've been seeing a trend lately where the requirements of the designers
is brought up a lot in response to complaints about proposed changes.
Explanations as to what exactly these requirements usually have to be
repeatedly requested, and reasons why these requirements should override
other requirements are seldom given.
The two exceptions to this are the tops of the stacks:
So it's Whenever possible, you get these non-free fonts we like. Then we
throw in some supposedly-generic names used by prominent non-free fonts
with the platitude that they're often mapped to free fonts on Linux.
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:07 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.orgwrote:
The free font advocates have refused to identify the fonts that they
want to be considered and why they should be considered other than the
fact that they are free,
the fact that they are free specifically is what we want to be considered.
As for specific fonts, my knowledge of fonts extends to serif,
sans-serif, and monospace.
* DejaVu Serif. Conclusion: Widely installed, but horribly ugly
{{citation needed}}. Sounds like someone's peronsal opinion to me.
I just checked,[2] and it turns out DejaVu Sans is what I've been reading
Wikipedia in all these years. Seems far from horribly ugly to me. Nicer
than Arial used in Gmail where I and l look the same, or the font that
my system uses as a fallback for Helvetica (TeX Gyre Heros).
[2]: In Firefox: Tools → Web Developer → Inspector, then choose Fonts in
the box on the right.
and looks nothing like the style desired by the designers.
And why is this an overriding concern? I could as well state the designers
should desire a different style.
* Nimbus Roman No9 L. Conclusion: Basically a clone of Times. Most Linux
systems map Times to Nimbus Roman No9 L, so there is no advantage to
specifying Nimbus Roman No9 L rather than Times (which also maps to
fonts on Windows and Mac).
OTOH, there's no disadvantage to specifying Nimbus Roman No9 L with Times
as a fallback for Windows and Mac users.
* Linux Libertine. Conclusion: A well-designed free font that matches the
look of the Wikipedia wordmark. Unfortunately, it is not installed by
default on any systems (as far as anyone knows)
Why does this matter? If Libertine is a good font, why not use it and fall
back to other choices for people who don't have it?
* Liberation Sans. Conclusion: Essentially a free substitute for Arial.
Like Nimbus Roman, there is no advantage to specifying Liberation Sans
instead of Arial (which is at the bottom of the sans-serif stack) since
Linux systems will map to Liberation Sans anyway, while other systems will
apply Arial.
Again, there's no also disadvantage to specifying Liberation Sans with
Arial as a fallback for unfortunate users who only have non-free fonts
distributed with their OS.
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot of
expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal
supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues over
video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and
helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an effective
method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out. Maybe
you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like yourself
understand the problems and why this change was reverted?
Many people actually complained on the talk page about the rendering of
free fonts. Should we also ignore them?
On a side note software is never final. It is not like we are transitioning
from a free font to a non free font.
Just my 2 cents on this subject.
(written as a volunteer not a WMF employee)
On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.orgwrote:
That's not quite accurate. The new font stack is based on feedback from
Linux users who preferred that we take advantage of the font-mapping built
into Linux rather than trying to guess arbitrary fonts that may or may not
be installed on their machine.
And ignoring the feedback from users who would rather see free fonts
explicitly supported?
Helvetica, Times, etc. are not non-free
software, they are names of well-established (non-copyrighted) typefaces
Considering that typefaces aren't eligible for copyright in the US,[1]
that's not saying anything.
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces
We're trying to balance the requirements of the designers
I've been seeing a trend lately where the requirements of the designers
is brought up a lot in response to complaints about proposed changes.
Explanations as to what exactly these requirements usually have to be
repeatedly requested, and reasons why these requirements should override
other requirements are seldom given.
The two exceptions to this are the tops of the stacks:
So it's Whenever possible, you get these non-free fonts we like. Then we
throw in some supposedly-generic names used by prominent non-free fonts
with the platitude that they're often mapped to free fonts on Linux.
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 12:07 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org
wrote:
The free font advocates have refused to identify the fonts that they
want to be considered and why they should be considered other than the
fact that they are free,
the fact that they are free specifically is what we want to be considered.
As for specific fonts, my knowledge of fonts extends to serif,
sans-serif, and monospace.
* DejaVu Serif. Conclusion: Widely installed, but horribly ugly
{{citation needed}}. Sounds like someone's peronsal opinion to me.
I just checked,[2] and it turns out DejaVu Sans is what I've been reading
Wikipedia in all these years. Seems far from horribly ugly to me. Nicer
than Arial used in Gmail where I and l look the same, or the font that
my system uses as a fallback for Helvetica (TeX Gyre Heros).
[2]: In Firefox: Tools → Web Developer → Inspector, then choose Fonts in
the box on the right.
and looks nothing like the style desired by the designers.
And why is this an overriding concern? I could as well state the designers
should desire a different style.
* Nimbus Roman No9 L. Conclusion: Basically a clone of Times. Most Linux
systems map Times to Nimbus Roman No9 L, so there is no advantage to
specifying Nimbus Roman No9 L rather than Times (which also maps to
fonts on Windows and Mac).
OTOH, there's no disadvantage to specifying Nimbus Roman No9 L with Times
as a fallback for Windows and Mac users.
* Linux Libertine. Conclusion: A well-designed free font that matches the
look of the Wikipedia wordmark. Unfortunately, it is not installed by
default on any systems (as far as anyone knows)
Why does this matter? If Libertine is a good font, why not use it and fall
back to other choices for people who don't have it?
* Liberation Sans. Conclusion: Essentially a free substitute for Arial.
Like Nimbus Roman, there is no advantage to specifying Liberation Sans
instead of Arial (which is at the bottom of the sans-serif stack) since
Linux systems will map to Liberation Sans anyway, while other systems will
apply Arial.
Again, there's no also disadvantage to specifying Liberation Sans with
Arial as a fallback for unfortunate users who only have non-free fonts
distributed with their OS.
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On 16 February 2014 18:04, Jon Robson jdlrob...@gmail.com wrote: On a side note software is never final. It is not like we are transitioning from a free font to a non free font. There's been a serious camel's-nose effect of late, with Foundation developers *really heavily* pushing non-free fonts, formats, etc. Let's get to the deeper issue. What's up with this? - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] GSoC 2014 Project
Hi Everyone Firstly I, Shubham would like to introduce myself to the developers of this commmunity. I am currently pursuing Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Roorkee INDIA. I had got a good knowledge of the tools used for the development of open source software. My skills include Programming languages: GNU C/C++, Java, Python, Javascript, Version control systems Git/Github and SVN. I am also aware with many of the web development application tools and content management systems. I am an ambitious person willing to learn other technologies when need in future. I choose this organisation for the contribution as the work the community does looks very appealing and interesting to me and useful for the whole community. The skills used by the organisation for the development of open source software matches with my skills to much extent. I have ideas to improve and excel interest in lay people in Gene wiki* by including the short interesting video based learning which takes the data from Wikimedia and create a short video which helps the people to understand easily. I need a help to work on this.* In this approach I would like to implement mechanism in which long paragraphs will be extracted from geneWiki and organized in a way that can be shown as pictures or frame of pictures. Through this mechanism people would be able to learn easily because pictures or videos are remembered more easily. Thanks Shubham ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] GSoC 2014 Project
Hi Wikitech developers, I had sent an introductory mail itnroducing myself to the community around one week before but did not seek any reply from the mentors. On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 11:50 PM, shubham singhal shubham.singhal...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Everyone Firstly I, Shubham would like to introduce myself to the developers of this commmunity. I am currently pursuing Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Roorkee INDIA. I had got a good knowledge of the tools used for the development of open source software. Shubham I wonder how the skills can match exactly the same except java Language which you had mentioned over here. I had mentioned my skills in the same format one week before to the community and introduced myself. My skills include Programming languages: GNU C/C++, Java, Python, Javascript, Version control systems Git/Github and SVN. I am also aware with many of the web development application tools and content management systems. I am an ambitious person willing to learn other technologies when need in future. Even you found the work of the community appealing because of the same reasons which I had mentioned before in my mail. You have exactly copied the first 3 paragraphs of the mail from my mail which was sent earlier. except you had mentioned the idea at last for discussion. It is good to see the way of expression and introduction of others with the community instead of just changing the name, university and post it after sometime to the mailing list. Infact I just want to work on my proposal instead of concentrating on others but don't copy the contents from the mail of others. I choose this organisation for the contribution as the work the community does looks very appealing and interesting to me and useful for the whole community. The skills used by the organisation for the development of open source software matches with my skills to much extent. I have ideas to improve and excel interest in lay people in Gene wiki* by including the short interesting video based learning which takes the data from Wikimedia and create a short video which helps the people to understand easily. I need a help to work on this.* In this approach I would like to implement mechanism in which long paragraphs will be extracted from geneWiki and organized in a way that can be shown as pictures or frame of pictures. Through this mechanism people would be able to learn easily because pictures or videos are remembered more easily. Thanks Shubham ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC 2014 Project
It is good to see the way of expression and introduction of others with the community instead of just changing the name, university and post it after sometime to the mailing list. Infact I just want to work on my proposal instead of concentrating on others but don't copy the contents from the mail of others. Thanks Nitika for pointing this out. I'll take care about this. But I think this mailing list isn't about how u r expressing or introducing yourself. This mailing list is meant to discuss about ideas and how people can contribute to the community also the development work. Apology if it caused some sort of inconvenience to you. Thanks Shubham On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Nitika nitikaagarwa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Wikitech developers, I had sent an introductory mail itnroducing myself to the community around one week before but did not seek any reply from the mentors. On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 11:50 PM, shubham singhal shubham.singhal...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Everyone Firstly I, Shubham would like to introduce myself to the developers of this commmunity. I am currently pursuing Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Roorkee INDIA. I had got a good knowledge of the tools used for the development of open source software. Shubham I wonder how the skills can match exactly the same except java Language which you had mentioned over here. I had mentioned my skills in the same format one week before to the community and introduced myself. My skills include Programming languages: GNU C/C++, Java, Python, Javascript, Version control systems Git/Github and SVN. I am also aware with many of the web development application tools and content management systems. I am an ambitious person willing to learn other technologies when need in future. Even you found the work of the community appealing because of the same reasons which I had mentioned before in my mail. You have exactly copied the first 3 paragraphs of the mail from my mail which was sent earlier. except you had mentioned the idea at last for discussion. It is good to see the way of expression and introduction of others with the community instead of just changing the name, university and post it after sometime to the mailing list. Infact I just want to work on my proposal instead of concentrating on others but don't copy the contents from the mail of others. I choose this organisation for the contribution as the work the community does looks very appealing and interesting to me and useful for the whole community. The skills used by the organisation for the development of open source software matches with my skills to much extent. I have ideas to improve and excel interest in lay people in Gene wiki* by including the short interesting video based learning which takes the data from Wikimedia and create a short video which helps the people to understand easily. I need a help to work on this.* In this approach I would like to implement mechanism in which long paragraphs will be extracted from geneWiki and organized in a way that can be shown as pictures or frame of pictures. Through this mechanism people would be able to learn easily because pictures or videos are remembered more easily. Thanks Shubham ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- . ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC 2014 Project
I have ideas to improve and excel interest in lay people in Gene wiki* by including the short interesting video based learning which takes the data from Wikimedia and create a short video which helps the people to understand easily. I need a help to work on this.* In this approach I would like to implement mechanism in which long paragraphs will be extracted from geneWiki and organized in a way that can be shown as pictures or frame of pictures. Through this mechanism people would be able to learn easily because pictures or videos are remembered more easily. Thanks Shubham You are more likely to get a useful response if you ask a more direct question. What specificly are you looking for help with? Are you simply looking for gsoc mentors? In that case you should say that explicitly. Additionally creating a detailed description of what you want to do (perhaps with a mock up) on a user subpage may help attract mentors. If you are encountering a specific issue you need help resolving, please say what they are. -bawolff P.s. also you should make clear that gene wiki is a wikiproject on wikipedia not an external wiki. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On Feb 16, 2014 2:04 PM, Jon Robson jdlrob...@gmail.com wrote: Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot of expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues over video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an effective method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out. Maybe you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like yourself understand the problems and why this change was reverted? I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or otherwise privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think attitudes like that are a real problem. Supposedly we are an open community. People should be entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a public mailing list no matter if the request comes from a wmf staffer like Brad, or if it comes from somebody you have never heard of before. In fact i would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be public on the wiki from the get go, without anyone even asking for it. [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57659 ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Brian Wolff bawo...@gmail.com wrote: I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or otherwise privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think attitudes like that are a real problem. Supposedly we are an open community. People should be entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a public mailing list no matter if the request comes from a wmf staffer like Brad, or if it comes from somebody you have never heard of before. In fact i would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be public on the wiki from the get go, without anyone even asking for it. I would like to ask if people want to discuss side issues like whether to use a mailing list or not, or David's suspicions about a growing trend of preferring non-free software :P, or ULS history, you start a new thread and not hijack this one. This conversation is heated and complex enough. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On 16 February 2014 22:28, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: or David's suspicions about a growing trend of preferring non-free software :P No, I'm not in fact joking. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?
On 16 February 2014 23:16, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 February 2014 22:28, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: or David's suspicions about a growing trend of preferring non-free software :P No, I'm not in fact joking. I'm not sure it's so much preferring as not giving a damn, so please don't put words in my mouth. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Communication of decisions (was Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
quote name=Brian Wolff date=2014-02-16 time=18:00:29 -0400 On Feb 16, 2014 2:04 PM, Jon Robson jdlrob...@gmail.com wrote: Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot of expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues over video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an effective method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out. Maybe you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like yourself understand the problems and why this change was reverted? I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or otherwise privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think attitudes like that are a real problem. Supposedly we are an open community. People should be entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a public mailing list no matter if the request comes from a wmf staffer like Brad, or if it comes from somebody you have never heard of before. In fact i would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be public on the wiki from the get go, without anyone even asking for it. See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen. The team I most recently heard champion that rule was the Mobile Team. Greg -- | Greg GrossmeierGPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @gregA18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D | ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Meetings vs mailing list (Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Jon Robson jdlrob...@gmail.com wrote: Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot of expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues over video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an effective method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out. Maybe you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like yourself understand the problems and why this change was reverted? As Brad's manager, I think it's fine to invite Brad to a meeting if you believe that the mailing list won't work for the conversation you'd like to have. However, I object to putting the responsibility for initiating a video conversation on him. As Brian Wolff mentioned earlier in the font thread, a public mailing list is a perfectly fine place to bring this sort of thing up, since sooner or later, this issue would have found its way to this mailing list anyway. For what it's worth, I think I can represent Brad's viewpoint pretty well, so if anyone wants to discuss this with me in the office, I'm happy to oblige. Rob ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Communication of decisions (was Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen. The team I most recently heard champion that rule was the Mobile Team. Agreed on this. Even on Gerrit, it is hard to keep track of possible changes and decisions being made. The mailing list is an important medium for any significant discussion and announcements concerning MediaWiki. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Communication of decisions (was Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen. Wikitech is great for discussing things with a wider audience especially where we need to seek opinions of developers outside the staff. But most decisions people make are documented on a wiki, Bugzilla, and/or their preferred project management tool. A mailing list is quite bad at reaching a consensus decision on something, as evidenced by the fact that we hold RFCs on a wiki, and not here. No one is suggesting that we should make all decisions via teleconferencing. If you read Jon's comment with good faith, he obviously wants to reach common ground with Brad on a contentious issue, and suggested using a medium that is different than what we've tried already. Brad has brought this up repeatedly on the list and Talk:Typography Refresh, discussing this with both end users who disagreed and fellow staff members. Little apparent progress has been made in reaching consensus. Jon's trying to be respectful and reach common ground with a coworker. I don't think anyone should be taken to task for such behavior, not when (as you say) Jon's clearly been part of a team that has pushed for better documentation of decisions than just in-office face to face meetings. In short: mountain out of a mole hill. Don't assume people don't care about public discussion because they want to have a 1-1 with someone whose opinion they think is important. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meetings vs mailing list (Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On 16 February 2014 23:42, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: For what it's worth, I think I can represent Brad's viewpoint pretty well, so if anyone wants to discuss this with me in the office, I'm happy to oblige. Cool, I'll just pop in. Oh, wait. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meetings vs mailing list (Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 4:03 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 16 February 2014 23:42, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: For what it's worth, I think I can represent Brad's viewpoint pretty well, so if anyone wants to discuss this with me in the office, I'm happy to oblige. Cool, I'll just pop in. Oh, wait. FWIW, I'm also frequently on IRC (like now). I asked a question on #wikimedia-dev a little bit ago which is relevant to my research on this conversation, since it looks like I'm going to be part of this conversation whether I want to or not. As of a few minutes ago, I'm also on #wikimedia-design, which is probably a little more targeted. A big reason why we invest in an office rather than just have everyone everywhere work from home all of the time is that face-to-face conversations are often very high bandwidth and the type that many (most?) people are best equipped to deal with in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary escalation of tension. I made the offer for an in-person conversation because I think I can provide our office conversations with a healthy dose of Helvetica Neue skepticism, and I suspect Brad will be relieved that it won't be all on him to defend his viewpoint. I also suspect you and I may be reasonably well-aligned on this issue, too. Rob ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Communication of decisions (was Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
Firstly apologies if my mail was read as public discussions = bad. That was not my intention. The fact I am on a vacation and writing emails on a phone with a heavily bandaged hand (which hurts when i type) surely shows I care a lot about this matter (and the fact that I am doing so on a phone might account for it being worded badly). Thanks Steven for reading it as it was intended. The problem that I am seeing is that we have these discussions on talk pages, countless mailing lists, Bugzilla, MediaWiki pages, gerrit commit summaries ... where should decisions be recorded in such a way that they can be found? We are obviously failing... From my perspective the decision for this change was communicated - at the code level. See https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/108155/ and the code is the first place someone should go to understand why something is happening. As can be seen in the commit summary there was a meeting and this was the outcome... (I was not in said meeting and your can see from the review that I demanded to understand why said change was happening in an attempt to help document this.) Meetings imo are sometimes more effective than mailing list conversations especially for any design related work and I don't think this needs to go against the idea of an open community as long as output is recorded in some form. In this particular situation I ask all of you how could a better job in communicating the dropping of free fonts have been done? What can we learn from this to improve our communication? On 16 Feb 2014 19:36, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: quote name=Brian Wolff date=2014-02-16 time=18:00:29 -0400 On Feb 16, 2014 2:04 PM, Jon Robson jdlrob...@gmail.com wrote: Brad since you work for the for the foundation and seem to have a lot of expertise in this area and seem to have been one of the more vocal supporters of free fonts have you reached out to your work colleagues over video conferencing or similar to understand the problems being hit and helped them work through them? Email doesn't seem to have been an effective method of communication in this situation as you have pointed out. Maybe you can help with documenting these issues and helping people like yourself understand the problems and why this change was reverted? I've seen setiment like this (discuss in person, in hangout, or otherwise privately) pop up recently (e.g on [1]). I think attitudes like that are a real problem. Supposedly we are an open community. People should be entirely prepared to explain their reasoning for doing anything on a public mailing list no matter if the request comes from a wmf staffer like Brad, or if it comes from somebody you have never heard of before. In fact i would argue that the criteria and results of evaluations should be public on the wiki from the get go, without anyone even asking for it. See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen. The team I most recently heard champion that rule was the Mobile Team. Greg -- | Greg GrossmeierGPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E | | identi.ca: @gregA18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D | ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l On 16 Feb 2014 20:01, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen. Wikitech is great for discussing things with a wider audience especially where we need to seek opinions of developers outside the staff. But most decisions people make are documented on a wiki, Bugzilla, and/or their preferred project management tool. A mailing list is quite bad at reaching a consensus decision on something, as evidenced by the fact that we hold RFCs on a wiki, and not here. No one is suggesting that we should make all decisions via teleconferencing. If you read Jon's comment with good faith, he obviously wants to reach common ground with Brad on a contentious issue, and suggested using a medium that is different than what we've tried already. Brad has brought this up repeatedly on the list and Talk:Typography Refresh, discussing this with both end users who disagreed and fellow staff members. Little apparent progress has been made in reaching consensus. Jon's trying to be respectful and reach common ground with a coworker. I don't think anyone should be taken to task for such behavior, not when (as you say) Jon's clearly been part of a team that has pushed for better documentation of decisions than just in-office face to face meetings. In short:
Re: [Wikitech-l] Meetings vs mailing list (Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On 17 February 2014 00:20, Rob Lanphier ro...@wikimedia.org wrote: I made the offer for an in-person conversation because I think I can provide our office conversations with a healthy dose of Helvetica Neueh skepticism, and I suspect Brad will be relieved that it won't be all on him to defend his viewpoint. I also suspect you and I may be reasonably well-aligned on this issue, too. Yeah, sorry for snapping. I realise that a lot more gets done at high bandwidth, I worry that this can achieve local consensus that just happens to treat principles that may be important to others as disposable. I did get a whiff of the interaction as it happens visiting in December, even if I was mostly in the 6th-floor land of infuriating intangibles rather than the 3rd-floor land of things that work or don't. I apologise for my frustration. - d. ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Communication of decisions (was Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On Feb 16, 2014 4:01 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Greg Grossmeier g...@wikimedia.org wrote: See also: The general rule among many engineering departments at WMF is If it didn't happen on the list (or somewhere similarly public and indexable) it didn't happen. Wikitech is great for discussing things with a wider audience especially where we need to seek opinions of developers outside the staff. But most decisions people make are documented on a wiki, Bugzilla, and/or their preferred project management tool. A mailing list is quite bad at reaching a consensus decision on something, as evidenced by the fact that we hold RFCs on a wiki, and not here. No one is suggesting that we should make all decisions via teleconferencing. And I'm not saying the opposite. I'm just referring to the communication of those decisions (see subject ;)). The end reasoning and decision part (at least). Tangentially, I very much disagree with the sentiment that email = bad for group discussion. There are so many counter examples where it is good for discussion, and notably in technical discussions where details/quoting is important. End rant :) Greg (from phone) ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Communication of decisions (was Re: Should MediaWiki CSS prefer non-free fonts?)
On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Steven Walling steven.wall...@gmail.comwrote: Wikitech is great for discussing things with a wider audience especially where we need to seek opinions of developers outside the staff. Which is basically almost always :) No one is suggesting that we should make all decisions via teleconferencing. I'd suggest none be made via teleconferencing, but I know that won't happen :) -Chad ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] Bugzilla Weekly Report
MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for February 10, 2014 - February 17, 2014 Wikimedia Bugzilla report (FAILED), DB connection failure FAILED DB connection failure ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Bugzilla Weekly Report
Filed as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61453 On 17 February 2014 03:00, reporter repor...@kaulen.wikimedia.org wrote: MediaWiki Bugzilla Report for February 10, 2014 - February 17, 2014 Wikimedia Bugzilla report (FAILED), DB connection failure FAILED DB connection failure ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
