[16:51:11] <YuviPanda>	 aharoni: office hours in 9min?
[16:54:33] <arrbee>	 YuviPanda: 6 mins
[16:54:46] <YuviPanda>	 ok :)
[16:59:41] <arrbee>	 Its time. We are using meetbot today.
[17:00:20] <arrbee>	 #startmeeting Language Engineering monthly office hour
[17:00:21] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Meeting started Wed Feb 12 17:00:20 2014 UTC and is due to finish in 60 minutes.  The chair is arrbee. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
[17:00:21] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic #startvote.
[17:00:21] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 The meeting name has been set to 'language_engineering_monthly_office_hour'
[17:00:42] <arrbee>	 Hello, Welcome to the monthly office hour of the Wikimedia Language Engineering team.
[17:01:10] <arrbee>	 My name is Runa and I am the Outreach and QA coordinator for the team.
[17:01:56] <Niharika>	 Hi arrbee. :)
[17:02:06] <arrbee>	 My team mates joining in for this session today are: aharoni kart_ Nikerabbit santhosh_
[17:02:19] <pginer>	 Hi, I also joined from SF
[17:02:20] <arrbee>	 Hey Niharika :)
[17:02:35] <arrbee>	 pginer: Hey there.. good morning
[17:02:45] * brion  waves hi at language team

[17:02:57] <arrbee>	 Our last office hour was held on January 8, 2014. The logs are at:
[17:03:06] <arrbee>	 #link https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2014-01-08
[17:03:24] <arrbee>	 Hello brion
[17:03:39] <arrbee>	 IMPORTANT: As the topic of the channel suggests, the chat today will be logged and publicly posted.
[17:03:57] <arrbee>	 A quick introduction first
[17:04:29] <arrbee>	 We are the Language Engineering team of the Wikimedia Foundation
[17:04:45] <arrbee>	 Our mission is to build language features and tools to support our wiki communities across the world.
[17:05:06] <aharoni>	 oh hi brion
[17:05:15] <arrbee>	 Currently Wikimedia projects are available in close to 300 languages
[17:05:23] <aharoni>	 hello YuviPanda , Pavanaja , Niharika
[17:05:38] <Pavanaja>	 Hello aharoni
[17:05:42] <arrbee>	 We also release an extension bundle every month that can be used by all MediaWiki installations to make them multi-lingual
[17:05:43] <Niharika>	 Hi aharoni!
[17:06:04] <arrbee>	 We call it the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) and you can read more about it at:
[17:06:16] <arrbee>	 #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Language_Extension_Bundle
[17:06:45] <arrbee>	 Today we want to focus our discussions around the recent events related to the Universal Language Selector (ULS)
[17:07:37] <arrbee>	 But we are quite flexible about the discussions
[17:07:50] <arrbee>	 #topic Universal Language Selector - deactivation and changes
[17:08:23] <arrbee>	 As some of you may already know, ULS is the unified language configuration tool developed and deployed on all Wikimedia wikis last year
[17:09:18] <arrbee>	 It provides users the benefit of configuring all language settings with a uniform user experience
[17:09:53] <arrbee>	 After deployment in June 2013, we were notified by ops that ULS webfonts may be adding some extra payload to the wiki pages
[17:11:07] <arrbee>	 Delivery of fonts was needed on several wikis for reasons ranging from basic text display to mixed character text on the same page
[17:11:29] <arrbee>	 But sometimes it slowed down the loading of pages
[17:12:01] <arrbee>	 Webfonts are an important feature for some languages for which fonts are not widely available or well supported
[17:12:25] <arrbee>	 We made several tweaks to judge the appropriate scenarios where webfont delivery can be limited
[17:12:51] <arrbee>	 #info Unfortunately ULS was turned off abruptly on all the wikis late last month
[17:13:17] <arrbee>	 It was not removed, but it was turned off by default and a preference was added for logged in users to enable it
[17:13:39] <arrbee>	 This severely hampered (amongst others):
[17:14:09] <arrbee>	 1. non-logged-in users who could not use input methods or select fonts (including the OpenDyslexic font)
[17:14:50] <arrbee>	 2. users with real need for webfonts i.e. no other font works for the language/script of their wiki and they could not find the preference switch
[17:15:07] <arrbee>	 Like users of the Javanese script
[17:15:14] <arrbee>	 You can see a page at:
[17:15:23] <arrbee>	 #link https://jv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhiskusi:Joko_Widodo
[17:15:48] <arrbee>	 3. Content written in ancient scripts like on wikisource.org
[17:16:10] <arrbee>	 Our priority was to get ULS back as early as possible
[17:17:03] <arrbee>	 #info The current plan is to to start re-enabling ULS on the Wikimedia wikis from Thursday evening UTC
[17:17:17] <Pavanaja>	 That is good news
[17:17:17] <arrbee>	 But with webfonts loading disabled by default
[17:17:33] <arrbee>	 We expect all the Wikis to have ULS by middle of next week
[17:17:54] <arrbee>	 The immediate changes you will see are:
[17:17:54] <brion>	 yay!
[17:18:09] <arrbee>	 1. A checkbox on the panel to disable/enable webfonts
[17:18:17] <ugh>	 if you had manually opted into ULS with the preference, will it be retained for the webfont loading?
[17:18:40] <aharoni>	 no, it's not related
[17:19:02] <ugh>	 ok
[17:19:17] <arrbee>	 For the Wikimedia wikis this checkbox will be disabled by default
[17:19:30] <Pavanaja>	 As such I use system font and not webfont
[17:19:48] <arrbee>	 2. The preference you may have been using to enable ULS from Special:Preferences the last few weeks will be removed
[17:20:10] <arrbee>	 3. Also, anonymous users can use ULS again
[17:20:36] <arrbee>	 However, this still does not solve the original problem we were trying to mitigate:
[17:20:47] <Pavanaja>	 "anonymous users can use ULS again" --> this is great news
[17:20:51] <arrbee>	 *making text readable for all users*
[17:21:05] <arrbee>	 Pavanaja: yeah :)
[17:21:18] <Steinsplitter>	 indeed :)
[17:21:42] <arrbee>	 We have drawn up plans to find viable engineering solutions to optimize the webfont delivery feature, *without* degrading the performance
[17:21:57] <arrbee>	 I will direct you here for the details:
[17:22:05] <arrbee>	 #link https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/Upcoming_Development_Plan
[17:22:40] <arrbee>	 TL;DR: we will use event-logging to monitor the usage data in the coming weeks, analyse them and get webfonts back for the groups where it breaks usability completely
[17:23:08] <arrbee>	 where it -> 'lack of webfonts'
[17:23:22] <alolita>	 groups = language families
[17:23:33] <arrbee>	 During this time we would also like to know more about any other severe impact that the current ULS setup causes
[17:23:41] <arrbee>	 Hi alolita
[17:23:50] <alolita>	 Hi!
[17:24:04] <arrbee>	 Thats all. Moving over to the Q & A now
[17:24:15] <arrbee>	 #topic Q & A and Discussion
[17:24:18] <alolita>	 aharoni: can you talk a bit about the analysis we plan to do
[17:24:57] <aharoni>	 it's pretty straightforward, really.
[17:25:15] <Pavanaja>	 I believe already there is an option in ULS to optionally load webfont
[17:25:19] <aharoni>	 mostly we want to know better who needs webfonts,
[17:25:25] <aharoni>	 who uses them,
[17:25:31] <aharoni>	 and how does it affect performance.
[17:26:35] <aharoni>	 one strategy is anonymous logging of "tofu detection" - a heuristic that checks whether the user's browser show squares instead of a real font.
[17:26:57] <aharoni>	 (there's no straightforward way to check that a font is available because of privacy concerns.)
[17:27:09] <alolita>	 how accurate is tofu detection for various language families
[17:27:23] <Xelgen>	 hi all! talking about performance, do we mean server load, ot page load times? not sure if I got that right
[17:27:25] <aharoni>	 we are not doing anything about language families.
[17:27:32] <aharoni>	 we deal with different scripts.
[17:27:39] <aharoni>	 for most scripts it's fairly accurate.
[17:28:19] <aharoni>	 it doesn't work for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, but we don't provide fonts for them anyway, for other reasons.
[17:28:34] <alolita>	 thanks for that clarification amir
[17:28:46] <aharoni>	 Xelgen: both, although we are currently focused mostly on page load times.
[17:29:05] <aharoni>	 we had severe server load issues in the past, but these are mostly resolved.
[17:29:22] <aharoni>	 (also, Xelgen, thanks a lot for the WikiEditor patch you submitted for improving Armenian support!)
[17:30:14] <aharoni>	 now a little more about analytics:
[17:30:34] <aharoni>	 we are going to check how many people actually enable webfonts,
[17:30:41] <aharoni>	 both logged-in and anonymous users,
[17:31:23] <Xelgen>	 (my pleasure, aharoni, have few more ideas, guess will discuss it later in #i18n)
[17:31:46] <aharoni>	 and we are going to check more carefully how do fonts and the lack thereof influence how long do people stay on the site, click links, edit, etc.
[17:31:49] <alolita>	 aharoni - this would be using event logging data?
[17:31:51] <aharoni>	 these are the important parts.
[17:32:08] <aharoni>	 alolita - yes, EventLogging, and usual click statistics.
[17:32:13] <aharoni>	 all anonymized, of course.
[17:32:18] <alolita>	 aharoni: thanks
[17:33:04] <aharoni>	 [ Xelgen - if you don't see me there, do ping me on email... I sometimes forget disconnect from IRC and forget to reconnect :) ]
[17:33:40] <arrbee>	 Quick time check. We have 25 more minutes.
[17:33:47] <alolita>	 any questions on the ULS development plan?
[17:34:53] <alolita>	 arrbee: can you give us an update on when the current patch is planned for deployment
[17:35:26] <arrbee>	 The plan is to start deployment tomorrow.
[17:35:48] <Pavanaja>	 When will be the deployment for Indic?
[17:36:00] <Xelgen>	 Ill have few questions/thought related to webfonts in the end, if we'll have time
[17:36:05] <arrbee>	 Pavanaja: By middle of next week all the Wikimedia wikis will have ULS
[17:36:39] <arrbee>	 enabled with the new checkbox for webfont toggle
[17:36:55] <arrbee>	 Nikerabbit: would you like to add anything here about the deployment plan?
[17:37:25] <matanya>	 will the ULS download fonts?
[17:37:28] <Nikerabbit>	 arrbee: it will happen together with the regulr mediawiki updates
[17:37:36] <matanya>	 or they are all webfonts?
[17:37:50] <dcrossland>	 oops i am late
[17:37:56] <Nikerabbit>	 which means that most wikis get it next tuesday and wikipedias thursday after that
[17:37:57] * dcrossland  reads buffer

[17:38:43] <arrbee>	 Nikerabbit: Thanks
[17:39:13] <arrbee>	 Pavanaja: we plan to inform all the wikis as well before this happens
[17:39:24] <dcrossland>	 (the OpenDyslexic font license isnt good btw; eulexia is better :)
[17:39:28] <aharoni>	 matanya - they are webfonts. they are downloaded automatically, like images.
[17:39:50] <matanya>	 can they be prevented? to save bandwidth and the like?
[17:40:01] <alolita>	 dcrossland: hi! we are looking at both possibilities
[17:40:04] <Pavanaja>	 arrbee - thanks. I wait for the announcement
[17:40:09] <matanya>	 I mean in prefrences not in the browser
[17:40:26] <alolita>	 for an open source font supporting dyslexia
[17:40:28] <aharoni>	 matanya: yes,
[17:40:58] <aharoni>	 now there will be a preference to enable/disable the downloading.
[17:41:03] <aharoni>	 initially it will be off by default.
[17:41:15] <matanya>	 thanks
[17:41:17] <aharoni>	 it may change to be on by default in the future after we tweak stuff.
[17:41:32] <Nikerabbit>	 if one is deeply concerned about bandwidth, I would recommend trying out the mobile site
[17:42:10] <aharoni>	 [and by the way, we are very-very carefully experimenting with webfonts on mobile, but it's all in the lab. not enabled anywhere yet.]
[17:42:41] <dcrossland>	 alolita: opendyslexic's license is not legal imho, ianal :)
[17:43:11] <dcrossland>	 aharoni: you said "there's no straightforward way to check that a font is available because of privacy concerns."
[17:43:20] <dcrossland>	 aharoni: could you say more about this?
[17:43:21] <alolita>	 matanya: we are considering enabling webfonts by default initially only for languages where the reader is completely blocked e.g. divehi
[17:43:31] <alolita>	 dcrossland: yes we know
[17:43:45] <matanya>	 thanks alolita
[17:43:47] <alolita>	 dcrossland: our legal team is aware of the issues and we're working with them
[17:44:00] <dcrossland>	 aharoni: the google web font loader js uses a div measuring technique to detect the loading of a web font, this could be used to check its existing availability too (if it does't already)
[17:44:17] <dcrossland>	 alolita: eulexia is legit :)
[17:44:43] <alolita>	 dcrossland: :-)
[17:44:44] <aharoni>	 dcrossland: web standards - JavaScript, HTML, CSS - don't have a function to see whether a font is present.
[17:44:46] <dcrossland>	 alolita: but some skeptic-minded googlers complained to me about the poor science behind these designs, so i didnt publish them yet
[17:45:00] <aharoni>	 our tofu detection technique is similar to what you said about Google.
[17:45:26] <dcrossland>	 aharoni: okay. did you see http://www.igvita.com/2014/01/31/optimizing-web-font-rendering-performance/ ?
[17:45:46] <alolita>	 dcrossland: we are working with the harfbuzz team on font tofu detection
[17:46:21] <alolita>	 dcrossland: as well as in touch with the google webfonts performance team
[17:47:46] <aharoni>	 hi alantz
[17:48:45] <aharoni>	 any more questions about fonts?
[17:49:05] <aharoni>	 cuz I have a little experiment to announce :)
[17:49:52] <aharoni>	 earlier today we re-configured VisualEditor support in translatewiki, so now all the different VisualEditor modules appear as one convenient component.
[17:50:09] <aharoni>	 it's a small configuration change, but it should make it easier to translate VisualEditor.
[17:51:11] <aharoni>	 you can find it here: https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:Translate?filter=&action=translate&group=ext-visualeditor-0-all
[17:51:12] <arrbee>	 Timecheck again: 10 mintues more
[17:51:26] <aharoni>	 check if your language is fully translated, and complete it
[17:51:28] <arrbee>	 s/minutes*
[17:51:31] <aharoni>	 just 238 strings, not that much :)
[17:51:42] <kart_>	 aharoni: thanks :)
[17:52:44] <aharoni>	 (i call it an "experiment" because the internal structure is new-ish, but it all looks the same to the translators.)
[17:53:22] <alolita>	 dcrossland: i think we missed introductions but i would like you to meet arrbee - our language engineering team's community outreach guru and aharoni - our team's RTL expert, and software engineer
[17:54:07] <dcrossland>	 alolita: i am in toronto with behdad now ;)
[17:54:11] <arrbee>	 Hi dcrossland :)
[17:54:17] <aharoni>	 oh say hi to Behdad.
[17:54:20] <arrbee>	 Thanks for dropping by
[17:54:23] <alolita>	 dcrossland - awesome!!! say hi to Behdad!
[17:54:52] <arrbee>	 We have 5 more minutes and I would like to start wrapping up now
[17:54:53] <aharoni>	 YuviPanda , Pavanaja , Xelgen , Niharika - check the statistics of your languages in VisualEditor translation:
[17:54:54] <aharoni>	 https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special%3AMessageGroupStats&x=D&group=ext-visualeditor-0-all#sortable:3=desc
[17:55:01] <aharoni>	 it's a pretty important extensions :)
[17:55:12] <aharoni>	 s/extensions/extension/
[17:55:15] <alolita>	 aharoni: pretty cool
[17:56:05] <brion>	 nice
[17:56:07] <alolita>	 this dashboard is very useful
[17:56:16] <Niharika>	 65%. Nice.
[17:56:27] <Nikerabbit>	 thanks to brion we will soon have wikipedia ios mobile app for translation in translatewiki.net
[17:56:39] <alolita>	 go brion!
[17:56:42] <brion>	 \o/
[17:56:43] <aharoni>	 Niharika: it would be mega-awesome if you could bring it 100%!
[17:56:45] <arrbee>	 yay!
[17:56:54] <brion>	 and we'll set up the new android one too if we haven't already
[17:56:58] <Xelgen>	 <aharoni>, thanks that's indeed more handy
[17:56:59] <aharoni>	 it should take you less than an hour, and I'm available for help.
[17:57:00] <brion>	 that one's simpler though, known file formats :D
[17:57:10] <Niharika>	 aharoni: I´ll try to!
[17:57:15] <Nikerabbit>	 known, horrible file formats
[17:57:25] <brion>	 :)
[17:57:26] <aharoni>	 translating our apps is also something that I'm enormously proud of.
[17:57:47] <aharoni>	 our really, really, really awesome volunteer translators make the Wikimedia apps the most translated mobile apps on the planet.
[17:57:59] <alantz>	 hello aharoni
[17:58:01] <Xelgen>	 and what are plans for languages where there are fonts available, but default font displayed to majority of visitors, is so bad, people try to read in different languages?
[17:58:04] <alolita>	 aharoni: can you share details about where to find the android translate app
[17:58:06] <aharoni>	 so i'm really excited about getting the new versions up for translation.
[17:58:32] <aharoni>	 the new Android app is not available yet, but the internal technology should be ready, and it should be available Some Time Very Soon.
[17:58:37] <aharoni>	 maybe Nikerabbit has more details.
[17:58:43] <alolita>	 Xelgen: do you mean where no fonts are available
[17:58:45] <Xelgen>	 that's the case with Armenian. And i'm not sure many visitors, understand why they dont' feel comfortable reading it, to go the preferences and adjust font settings
[17:58:57] <Nikerabbit>	 aharoni: STVS sounds accurate
[17:59:14] <aharoni>	 Xelgen: Yes, it's a known problem.
[17:59:15] <Xelgen>	 noep, I mean fonts are available, but they are small, serif style fonts, and look ugly on screen/put strain on eyes
[17:59:31] <aharoni>	 I actually didn't know it about Armenian,
[17:59:39] <aharoni>	 but we do have something like this with Malayalam.
[17:59:49] <Xelgen>	 I know community of Armenian Wikimedia projects would like to have good font embedded and enabled by default for all visitors
[18:00:05] <aharoni>	 what I'm thinking about is to have a kind of a switch that forces a webfont even if a user does have it,
[18:00:21] <alolita>	 Xelgen: if there are other fonts that are available which we can make available via webfonts - we can help you file a bug to track the request
[18:00:33] <aharoni>	 but this is only a thought for the future, it will be based on analytics that I mentioned earlier and feedback from the community.
[18:00:37] <Pavanaja>	 When will ULS be integrated with VE?
[18:00:50] <arrbee>	 #info A quick announcement: We are preparing to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014 and are now listing out projects we would like to put up.
[18:00:50] <alolita>	 and make these available for Armenian
[18:01:40] <Xelgen>	 that was part of the question, can we expect average visitor, to understand that the problem he has comes from fonts? I'm afraid only small fraction of visitos who want a better font, would try to mess with settings
[18:01:46] <arrbee>	 Pavanaja: We don't have a timeline yet.
[18:01:58] <arrbee>	 Ok.. we have run out of time on this channel
[18:02:06] <alolita>	 Pavanaja: ime support is already being integrated - please refer to the phased support plan
[18:02:09] <alolita>	 for VE
[18:02:27] <arrbee>	 I will have to direct conversations to #mediawiki-i18n
[18:02:47] <aharoni>	 Xelgen: ping me in that other channel :)
[18:02:51] <arrbee>	 :)
[18:02:52] <alolita>	 arrbee: that works - thanks
[18:03:00] <Xelgen>	 thanks :) I'll move to #i18n in 5 mins
[18:03:02] <arrbee>	 Thanks everyone for coming today.
[18:03:13] <arrbee>	 #info Our next office hour would be on 12 March 2014
[18:03:22] <Pavanaja>	 Bye
[18:03:24] <arrbee>	 Our mailing list is mediawiki-i18n@lists.wikimedia.org and IRC channel is #mediawiki-i18n
[18:03:33] <arrbee>	 Thanks everyone
[18:03:39] <arrbee>	 #endmeeting
[18:03:39] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Meeting ended Wed Feb 12 18:03:39 2014 UTC.  Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot . (v 0.1.4)
[18:03:39] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Minutes:        https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2014/wikimedia-office.2014-02-12-17.00.html
[18:03:39] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Minutes (text): https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2014/wikimedia-office.2014-02-12-17.00.txt
[18:03:39] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Minutes (wiki): https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2014/wikimedia-office.2014-02-12-17.00.wiki
[18:03:40] <wm-labs-meetbot>	 Log:            https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2014/wikimedia-office.2014-02-12-17.00.log.html
[18:03:44] <Niharika>	 Thanks arrbee.
[18:04:00] <arrbee>	 Niharika: :)
[18:04:01] <alolita>	 thanks all!
[18:04:13] <kart_>	 \0 all