The Wikimedia fundraiser is facilitated by two things: Banners and appeals. The banners appear at the top of the site, featuring a picture of someone from the Wikimedia movement (Jimmy, our founder, an editor, reader, or donor), and the words, “Please read: A personal appeal from Wikimedia (Founder|Editor|Reader) So and So.”

Clicking the banner lands you on a donation form featuring a letter from the person in the banner. A lot of fundraising experts have told us this is a dumb way to fundraise. They say people don’t read the appeals, and that surely there’s something better we could run in the banners other than “Please read a personal appeal.”

We’ve tested the appeal pages against simple donation forms with no appeals, with basic facts, and slogans, and nothing has performed better than the appeals. We’re happy about that, because we love that the fundraiser serves a double purpose of educating our 470 million readers about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement work.

But we’re unhappy that we haven’t been able to find anything better than “Please read a personal appeal” for our banners. It’s not for lack of trying. We’ve tested more than 100 different banner phrases. And we’ve tested a few non-human images (e.g. hands holding the Wikipedia globe logo).

Only one banner has occasionally beaten “Please read a personal appeal,” and that is: “If everyone reading this donated $5, we could end the fundraiser today.” But that banner seems to set the expectation that the fundraiser is about to end soon, so we only like to use that at the end of the campaign.

Last year, we asked the Wikimedia community to suggest banners and tested many of them. None came close to beating “personal appeal.” This year, though, thanks to a tool created by friends at Princeton University, we have a new way to revisit those ideas, and bring in some new ones, for testing.

Professor Salganik and his research group are the developers of All Our Ideas, an open source platform for public participation. It enables groups to collect and prioritize information in a way that is democratic, transparent, and efficient, and it has already been used by governments and non-profit organizations around the world.

He approached us about using this tool for choosing new banners to test and we said we would like to try it. You can go there now and start voting on banners at:

http://www.allourideas.org/wikipedia-banner-challenge

We’ll be watching the results and will test the ones that come out on top in the voting. We’ve helped to seed the tool with banners proposed by the community last year. We were not able to test all of the ideas suggested then. We will test at least a handful of the ones that come out on top in this voting process that haven’t been tested before — as long as they are in line with the spirit and values of the Wikimedia movement.

There is also a way to propose new ideas — and new images — for banners using the All Our Ideas tool.

Finally, one thing I should explain is why we’re looking for a better banner. Each year, we only raise what we need and then end the fundraiser. If a better banner brings double the number of donors from our best current banner, then we can cut the duration of the fundraiser in half — and that would be a very good thing.

Probably the most interesting highlight of today’s i18n deployment is the configuration of the Translate extension on MediaWiki.org. We have observed that on some wikis special pages exist that explain in the language of the Wiki functionality like Narayam or WebFonts. Such documentation is welcome on all MediaWiki installations where the functionality is used by people using the same language for their user interface.

For writing the documentation MediaWiki.org is the obvious platform. With the deployment of Translate we have the basis for writing and translating user documentation in a structured and organised way.

Narayam and WebFonts have been updated to the latest versions that have been tested on translatewiki.net. As Narayam and WebFonts are still very much a work in progress, we invite anyone to continue their testing at translatewiki.net . The changes are:

• menu appears only on click, not when hovering
• menu positions are now correct for RTL languages and do not go off screen any more
• Narayam and Webfonts support the Kannada script for the Tulu language on the Incubator

There are also some smaller fixes among them the change of the autonym for the Veps language to “Vepsän kel”.. The full details for all the changes is at revision 106667.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Not only had Karl Wahlen never edited Wikipedia prior to September 2011, he didn’t even know he could. That all changed when Karl enrolled in a University of Pittsburgh class called Sociology of Marriage, taught by Wikipedian Piotr Konieczny, a graduate student and a Teaching Fellow from Department of Sociology, and the Pittsburgh native found himself having to write a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework.

“When I learned on the first day that that I was going to be doing a Wikipedia project, I was rather confused,” Karl admits. “Honestly, when I first thought about it, I wondered how you worked on it, as I did not know at that point that you could even have an account on wikipedia, much less how it worked or how you used it.”

Karl Wahlen is an avid dog lover along with being an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh (pictured with his dog JJ).

Karl’s a busy student. He’s majoring in psychology, sociology, BPhil (BPhil is an honors degree where he does the equivalent of a master’s thesis in his undergraduate years), and biology, while also getting a certificate in the conceptual foundations of medicine, and a minor in economics and chemistry. His multidisciplinary interests led Karl to want to work on the article on Joint custody in the United States, which had elements of psychology and sociology. The article had languished for years without many sources or without being particularly well-written (you can see the version before Karl and his classmates started working on it here. Karl’s input helped bring the article up to meet the Did you know requirements, which landed the article on Wikipedia’s main page in late November. By early December, the article had passed the Good Article review process as well.

Karl credits help from his professor, Piotr Konieczny, for forcing students to write Wikipedia articles for class. A longtime supporter of the Schools and universities projects on Wikipedia, Piotr is also an Online Ambassador and instructor in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States. Piotr’s course was the first to participate in the American Sociology Association’s new Wikipedia Initiative.

“Our instructor really helped on every step of the way, especially when showing us how to interact with the community,” Karl says. “You occasionally get people who are not the nicest when they disagree with you, but in general individuals tend to remain respectful with each other, and for the most part all criticism ends up leading to a higher quality article in the end, which is a good thing.”

In fact, the research skills he gained through doing the Wikipedia assignment actually helped him tremendously in another class he’s taking this term on research methods. Learning to cite every sentence and making sure that every claim he made could be backed up to a reliable source for Wikipedia taught him valuable research and writing skills.

“I still maintain that this Wikipedia project made a world of difference in being able to write well,” Karl says. “And unlike a term paper, which is thrown away at the end of the semester, all the work that goes into a Wikipedia article continues to help people even after the class ends. I like knowing that the joint custody (United States) article is being read by 80+ people a day.”

Karl’s research for the Wikipedia assignment led him to want to add more to Wikipedia. He’s already created stub articles on Split custody and Sole custody, which he intends to expand in the near future.

“I will absolutely continue to edit after the class is over,” Karl says. “My instructor was outstanding and it will be a nice way to keep in touch with him. And not only can I do this to keep providing new information to others, but it also looks pretty darned good on a resume to say you spend your free time working on making articles to help people than sitting around watching TV. Thankfully, I enjoy doing this, so it is not like a chore to do.”

Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2010-11

The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to present the 2010-11 Annual Report, titled ‘the way the world tells its story.’ This year’s report focusses on global celebrations around Wikipedia 10, our emerging work in India, the global education program, our mobile expansion efforts, and on our major engineering/product accomplishments and ambitions.

We center the book around the amazing Arab Spring article, highlighting the inspiring quote from Wael Ghonim ‘Our revolution is like Wikipedia…’

This year we have also prepared six multilingual summary reports, in Japanese, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The report is as much a story of the work and activities of our international community as it is a traditional report on the work of WMF through the year. The report is both an update on the activities of the Foundation, and also a wide-ranging review of the work of chapters, volunteers, partners, and individuals around the world. We aim to enlighten the reader with the incredible range of activity and innovation in our movement – to take them beyond the idea that Wikipedia is simply text living on the web and show them a thriving and dynamic community.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. You can add comments along with the community on the meta wiki talk pages.

Many thanks to the report production team: Tilman Bayer, design strategist David Peters, and our story consultant David Weir, and our Communications intern AJ Alexander. Mostly we owe huge thanks to the Wikimedians who made and shared the beautiful imagery in the book by posting it to Commons. This is an ambitious, 100% fueled-by-free-works project. I’d like to think it’s one of the more unique and successful free culture printed works out there – and it wouldn’t be possible without our community.

Thanks and enjoy!

Jay Walsh, Communications

With a new sprint, new functionality for MediaWiki is identified to be deployed in two weeks time. There is room for dealing with issues to do with Narayam and WebFonts. Many of the new activities have to do with documentation, translation and feedback.

The sprint backlog in Mingle (user: guest password: guest)

What we hope for is that the feedback functionality that is now part of MediaWiki can be used to ask for feedback of MediaWiki features. It is obvious that the Wikimedia Localisation team cannot support all the 300+ languages that have their projects or exist in the incubator. What we can do is process the information we get from our language support teams. Figuring out how to do this is one of the goals for this sprint.

The use of Narayam and WebFonts will be helped a lot with documentation; “where to find that character on this keyboard mapping” or “what does an international keyboard look like” are questions looking for an answer. Determining how to document and what to translate is not all that obvious. With keyboard maps and fonts distributed as part of MediaWiki documenting on “the” wiki does not scale to other Wikimedia wikis and, MediaWiki wikis outside the Wikimedia Foundation are as much in need of documentation. When people start using MediaWiki because of such language support features we accomplish real support for a language.

For this sprint, these questions are looking for an answer and in the mean time the Translate extension will gain these new features:

• Documents that need translation can be grouped together; for instance all the Fundraiser messages or Wikimedia reports
• Documents can be marked as no longer needing translation
• Changes to the state of documents and translations will be logged and the log will be available for viewing
• Depending on the state of a document or a translation, attention can be drawn when there is a need for activity

User documentation needs translation and hopefully many of the algorithms used for the localisation of MediaWiki at translatewiki.net will equally apply for user documentation. Life will become a lot easier for all those people who administer MediaWiki and have only a basic understanding of English. We hope to deliver this in one of our future sprints.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

For the past several days, Wikipedia editors have been discussing whether to stage a protest against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  I’ve been asked to give some comments on the bill and explain what effect the proposed legislation might have on a free and open Internet as well as Wikipedia.  My goal in this blog post is to provide some information and interpretation that I hope will be helpful to Wikipedia editors as they discuss the bill.

SOPA has earned the dubious honor of facilitating Internet censorship in the name of fighting online infringement. The Wikimedia Foundation opposed that legislation, but we should be clear that Wikimedia has an equally strong commitment against copyright violations. The Wikimedia community, which has developed an unparalleled expertise in intellectual property law, spends untold hours ensuring that our sites are free of infringing content. In a community that embraces freely-licensed information, there is no room for copyright abuses.

We cannot battle, however, one wrong while inflicting another. SOPA represents the flawed proposition that censorship is an acceptable tool to protect rights owners’ private interests in particular media.  That is, SOPA would block entire foreign websites in the United States as a response to remove from sight select infringing material.  This is so even when other programs like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have found better balances without the use of such a bludgeon. For this reason, we applaud the excellent work of a number of like-minded organizations that are leading the charge against this legislation, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, Center for Democracy and Technology, NetCoalition, the Internet Society, AmericanCensorship.org, and others.

On Tuesday, after receiving input on the original version of the bill, the House Judiciary Committee issued a new version of SOPA for its mark-up scheduled for this coming Thursday.  A vote on that mark-up may take place on the same day.   At the end of this article, I provide a summary of the most relevant parts of this new version of SOPA as well as a summary of the legislative process (which you can also follow here).

In honesty, this new version of the bill is better (and credit goes to the Judiciary staff for that). But, it continues to suffer from the same structural pitfalls, including its focus on blocking entire international sites based on U.S.-based allegations of specific infringement.  Criticism has been significant.[1]  Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, for example, felt the bill “retains the fundamental flaws of its predecessor by blocking Americans’ ability to access websites, imposing costly regulation on Web companies and giving Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice broad new powers to police the Internet.”

Members of our community are weighing whether a protest action is appropriate.  I want to be very clear: the Wikimedia Foundation believes that the decision of whether to stage a protest on-wiki, such as shutting down the site or putting a banner at the top, is a community decision. The Wikimedia Foundation will support editors in whatever they decide to do. The purpose of this post is to provide information for editors that will aid them in their discussions.

I’ve been asked for a legal opinion. And, I will tell you, in my view, the new version of SOPA remains a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet.

• The new version continues to undermine the DMCA and federal jurisprudence that have promoted the Internet as well as cooperation between copyright holders and service providers.  In doing so, SOPA creates a regime where the first step is federal litigation to block an entire site wholesale: it is a far cry from a less costly legal notice under the DMCA protocol to selectively take down specified infringing material.   The crime is the link, not the copyright violation.  The cost is litigation, not a simple notice.

• The expenses of such litigation could well force non-profit or low-budget sites, such as those in our free knowledge movement, to simply give up on contesting orders to remove their links.  (Secs. 102(c)(3); 103(c)(2))  The international sites under attack may not have the resources to challenge extra-territorial judicial proceedings in the United States, even if the charges are false.

• The new version of SOPA reflects a regime where rights owners may seek to terminate advertising and payment services, such as PayPal, for an alleged “Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property.”  (Sec. 103(c)(2))  A rights owner must seek a court order (unlike the previous version) (Sec. 103(b)(5)).  Most rights owners are well intentioned, but many are not.[2]  We cannot assume that litigious actions to block small sites abroad will always be motivated in good faith, especially when the ability to defend is difficult.

• Although rendering it discretionary (Secs.102(c)(2)(A-E); 103(c)(2)(A-B)), the new bill would still allow for serious security risks to our communications and national infrastructure. The bill no longer mandates DNS blocking but still allows it as an option.  As Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director of Public Knowledge, explained:  “The amendment continues to encourage DNS blocking and filtering, which should be concerning for Internet security experts . . . .”

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation advises that the new proposed legislation still targets tools that might be used to “circumvent” the blacklist, even though those tools are essential to human rights activists and political dissidents around the world.

More specifically with respect to Wikimedia, the new version is an improvement, but, in addition to the reasons listed above, it remains unacceptable:

• Wikipedia arguably falls under the definition of an “Internet search engine,”[3] and, for that reason, a federal prosecutor could obtain a court order mandating that the Wikimedia Foundation remove links to specified “foreign infringing sites” or face at least contempt of court sanctions.[4]  The definition of “foreign infringing sites” is broad[5] and could well include legitimate sites that host mostly legal content, yet have other purported infringing content on their sites.   Again, many international sites may decide not to defend because of the heavy price tag, allowing an unchallenged block by the government.

• The result is that, under court order, Wikimedia would be tasked to review millions upon millions of sourced links, locate     the links of the so-called “foreign infringing sites,” and block them from our articles or other projects.   It costs donors’ money and staff resources to undertake such a tremendous task, and it must be repeated every time a prosecutor delivers a court order from any federal judge in the United States on any new “foreign infringing site.” Blocking links runs against our culture of open knowledge, especially when surgical solutions to fighting infringing material are available.

• Under the new bill, there is one significant improvement.  The new version exempts U.S. based companies – including the Wikimedia Foundation – from being subject to a litigation regime in which rights owners could claim that our site was an “Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property.”  Such a damnation against Wikimedia could have easily resulted in demands to cut off our fundraising payment processors.   The new version now exempts U.S. sites like ours.   (Sec. 103(a)(1)(A)(ii))

In short, though there have been some improvements with the new version, SOPA remains far from acceptable. Its definitions remain too loose, and its structural approach is flawed to the core.  It hurts the Internet, taking a wholesale approach to block entire international sites, and this is most troubling for sites in the open knowledge movement who probably have the least ability to defend themselves overseas.  The measured and focused approach of the DMCA has been jettisoned.  Wikimedia will need to endure significant burdens and expend its resources to comply with conceivably multiple orders, and the bill will deprive our readers of international content, information, and sources.

Geoff Brigham
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

[1.] http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-new-sopa-now-with-slightly-less-awfulness/ ;
http://cdt.org/blogs/david-sohn/1312proposed-revision-sopa-some-welcome-cuts-major-concerns-remain ;
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/sopa-manager’s-amendment-sorry-folks-it’s-still-blacklist-and-still-disaster

[2.] See http://www.chillingeffects.org/resource.cgi?ResourceID=101 (providing a list of articles documenting abuses that certain rights owners have engaged in within the DMCA context).

[3.] An “Internet Search Engine” is defined as “a service made available via the Internet whose primary function is gathering and reporting, in response to a user query, indexed information or web sites available elsewhere on the Internet.”  Sec. 101(15)(A).  This definition does not include services that retain “a third party that is subject to service of process in the United States to gather, index, or report information available elsewhere on the Internet.”  Sec. 101(15)(B).  Although not conceding the point, Wikimedia arguably does not appear to fall under this exemption.

[4.] Sec. 102(c)(3)(A)(i).  To ensure compliance with orders issued under Section 102, the Attorney General may bring an action for injunctive relief against any Internet Search Engine that knowingly and willfully fails to comply with the requirements of section 102(c)(2)(B) to compel such entity to comply with such requirements.

[5.] Generally speaking, a “foreign infringing site” is any U.S.-directed site, used by users in the United States, being operated in a manner that would, if it were a domestic Internet site, subject the site to liability for criminal copyright infringement, as well as other federal copyright or trade secret violations.  See Sec. 102(a)(1-2).

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The development of a Visual Editor is one of the Foundation’s top priorities for the upcoming year, as laid out by the 2011-2012 Annual Plan.  There is plenty of evidence that wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing to Wikipedia and our other projects.  Formal user tests, direct feedback from new editors, and anecdotal evidence collected over the past several years have made the need for a visual editor clear.

Developing a web-based visual editor is an extremely complex task.  It is perhaps the most challenging technical project ever undertaken in the history of MediaWiki development.  Here are some of the characteristics that make this project unique:

• We have to support editing in both the new way (via the Visual Editor) and the traditional way (via wiki markup).  This is important since it’s what our communities have used for more than 10 years: We can’t completely change the way they do their work overnight.  We need to, however, simultaneously support potential editors who are not comfortable with wiki markup.  So any editing system will need to be able to go back and forth between the Visual Editor and wiki markup with minimal, if any, disruption to the end user.  We will have to perform back-and-forth transformations without breaking things.  Anyone who has used an editor that has both “visual” and “html” modes should have a feeling for the challenges, but it’s even harder with wiki markup, because:
• Wiki markup is enormously expressive, complex and complicated, and there’s a huge amount of content which uses every facet of this markup language. Wikipedia articles employ a rich set of layout features, including images, tables, citations, mathematical formulas, “infoboxes” and other dynamically loaded templates which preserve a consistent look and feel for certain information, and many other elements that enable a compelling and educational reader experience (see the article on Calculus as an example).  Supporting compatibility with the full breadth of these features is an enormous technical challenge.

Over the past several months, the engineering team at WMF has made a lot of progress in developing this visual editor.  Today, we’d like to share the first prototype of a basic editing surface which supports the translation of what’s on the screen into wiki markup.  The demo, which can’t yet save or edit documents, supports both basic formatting (e.g., bold, italics, section heading) as well as many of the required features that people take for granted (e.g., cut/paste and undo/redo). However, it’s still very fragile, and you may easily end up with an unusable document. In the best case scenario, you can use it to generate valid wiki markup that you can copy and paste into an edit box on any MediaWiki wiki.

This version of Visual Editor should support most of the modern browsers but was tested mostly on Firefox, Chrome and IE9. We do support IE8 as well, but not IE7 (yet). The editor isn’t internationalized yet, but will be with the next release.

Try the visual editor sandbox

You can view the demo and see the wikitext translation by visiting the visual editor sandbox on mediawiki.org and playing around with any of the articles available for pre-loading.

Manipulation of an example document, showing the link editor.

Using the debugging tools in the top right, you can switch to side-by-side view of different content representations, including wikitext (icon with square brackets), which are dynamically updated as the text on the left changes.

We would love to get your input on our progress.  Please leave us comments by clicking on the “Leave Feedback” in the upper right hand corner of the demo, which will place your feedback on this page.  Thoughts on which tasks this interface makes easier or harder compared to your current workflow would be particularly helpful.  We’re very excited to share this progress and look forward to your feedback.

Where do we go from here? From here on, we will iteratively release features, bug-fixes, and updates.  We’ll continue to make this tool useful for more real-world use cases, and tick off additional features: creating pages, saving them, editing existing pages or sections, adding/removing images, editing data in templates, editing tables. . .the list goes on.

Our goal is to enable real-world editing of a subset of content soon, but it’ll still be some time until we can serve all the needs of even a small wiki community, let alone Wikipedia’s. Currently we’re targeting June 2012 for first production use at scale, either on a smaller wiki or a section of a larger one. It’s the biggest and most important change to our user experience we’ve ever undertaken, and we look forward to your help in making it happen.

– The Visual Editor Team, Wikimedia Foundation
Trevor Parscal, Inez Korczyński, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Roan Kattouw, Brion Vibber, Gabriel Wicke

Every Monday, the #Wikimedia Localisation team has a window of opportunity to roll out new and improved functionality. This release is at the end of an Agile sprint and it reflects the stories that our developers committed to develop at the start of the sprint. Multiple stories means that what is delivered can and does cover different functionalities; today is not different;

• It features the launch of WebFonts for selected Indic languages and projects
• All Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and Telegu wikis
• The Malayalam and Tamil wikis will not be supported by WebFonts for now
• Narayam  has several new keyboard methods more mappings, improved UI, support for modern and monobook skins
• Bug 31330 changes the preference to Babel extension information
• this improves the coexistence of Babel information in templates and the extension
• Cropping of text issues in the headers of many Indic languages finds a solution

Here are the statistics of Indic language Wikipedias for the month of October 2011. The data for this report is taken from http://stats.wikimedia.org/

I have restructured my report to make it shorter and easier to read and compare – but without losing any of the data points. I have divided it into Quality of Projects, Community Building, and Readership.

NOTE: I have used the Indian way way of denoting large numbers: Crore is equal to 10 million, and Lakh is 100,000.

Community

In the table below are new users who have edited at least 10 times, existing editors with at least 5 edits in that month, and existing editors with more than 100 edits in that month. Once again, it is essential to look at all three numbers in connjuction with each other.

Something that I have been reflecting on is how even in relatively small communities (which is what almost all Indic communities are) there is still a relatively low number of new users coming on board and a very tiny number of editors have edited more than 100 times. The former is self-evident as a problem because it means we need to do so much more to encourage new editors. The latter is worrying because it means we also need to do much more to encourage editor retention as well as editor motivation.

Malayalam and Tamil have the healthiest position on this table – across all three parameters and looking at progress month-on-month. This is most probably because of the strong efforts at community building in both communities. It is really important that these communities continue to build on their strong foundations.

I am particularly excited about two languages in this list. Both Marathi and Bengali editor counts have increased across all parameters and that is very encouraging. They are large languages with massive potential. I am also really hopeful that the Marathi media coverage around last month’s WikiConference is going to support the community as they go about encouraging and supporting new and existing editors.

Overall, though, it must be said that the total number of new editors coming to new Indic wikipedias is low. So focus need to be on bringing new editors to wiki and retaining existing users.

Quality of Projects

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After months of preparation, demonstrating the latest versions in person and on-line, going through tons of feedback and implement resulting modifications, we are ready for the launch of Webfonts. Web fonts is a technology that ensures us that the readers of our wikis will always see the intended characters on their screen. Many devices do not provide the necessary fonts that allow people to read their mother tongue.

When people do not even see what we aim to provide to them, we fail. According to the Wikipedia article, web fonts are considered “controversial” because the licenses of many fonts prevent them from being used as web fonts. There is no such controversy when freely licensed fonts are used and we are really happy with our collaboration with the producers of such fonts.  We learned that fonts working on one platform do not necessarily work as well on another platform / operating system.

Enabling people to read and enabling people to write their language is at this time our prime objective and, when people are happy when they find they can as they did at the localisation sprint in Pune. Being able to type Marathi or Punjabi, Hindi or Tamil on a thin client put a smile on many faces. They used the latest software at translatewiki.net and  the feedback we got from them and others has resulted in many technical and usability improvements.

The launch of WebFonts together with the Narayam improvements on Monday 12 December represents significant progress in helping enable Indic language contributions to our projects; it consists of a large amount of code, it will be implemented on a selected range of wikis and it affects many communities. It will affect them and the Wikis in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telegu.  All these communities have been involved it testing the evolving functionality at translatewiki and the comments and bug reports we received were essential for what we are now proud to present. With the launch more people will experience the WebFonts technology for the first time. We are eager to improve on what we have because we believe that the web fonts technology is crucial for the emancipation of many languages and scripts in this digital age..

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen

Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant