Typography refresh/Font choice

This document is in development, see history for sources.

Current situation
The status quo in MediaWiki core is as follows: for prose, we specify simply "sans-serif" for all text. This results in the following fonts:


 * Windows: Arial
 * Mac OSX: Helvetica
 * Ubuntu/Firefox: DejaVu Sans (presumably other Linux variants are similar)
 * Ubuntu/Chrome: Liberation Sans
 * Android: Roboto
 * iOS: Helvetica

Note that the differences between Firefox and Chrome on Linux seem to stem from Firefox using the OS-standard font resolution mechanism, and Chrome having a built-in heuristic that seems to be very heavily biased toward Liberation Sans.

Body font evaluation
Ten sans serif fonts were evaluated for use as the body (content) font. Style and technical quality were evaluated in blind tests (the evaluators were not told which fonts they were judging).
 * Appropriate style scores are based on readability, neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable information).
 * Technical quality scores are based on how well the fonts rendered combining diacritics, ties, and other "obscure" Unicode features.
 * Installation base scores are based on which operating systems the fonts are installed on by default.
 * Originally based on cursory research on Wikipedia.
 * Some canonical resources for availability (please expand): Fonts supplied with Windows 8 and other Windows; MAC OS X; Ubuntu packages by downloads. And for popularity: Google Fonts analytics.
 * Installation base is often restricted by licenses: in particular proprietary licenses; but also strong free licenses like GPL (cf. FreeFont FAQ) and unlike OFL. Arimo, DejaVu, Droid, Open Sans and Roboto are not copyleft, so they can be distributed almost everywhere.

Another test done by volunteers aimed to reflect the actual typefaces rendered in different combinations of browsers and platforms under three different scenarios: no typefaces defined, only free typefaces specified, and free & proprietary typefaces defined.

Standard font evaluation criteria include the inadequate rendering support which can allow spoofing.