Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Hosting of free fonts in Commons

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Reasons against

I tend to look after the font articles on Wikipedia. Because fonts are software, they can have updates fixing glitches or adding new characters. Also, there are lots of random fonts out there on websites like dafont (it claims to have 86 000 currently) that I'm not sure it makes sense to include. For this reason, I think it would be simplest not to do this and instead have Commons or Wikipedia link to creators' websites or repositories like GitHub, the Open Font Library or Google Fonts where up-to-date versions can be downloaded. For example, the article on Linear B cites specific fonts you can use for it).

Commons doesn't act as a general repository for open-source software that I know of, and although I don't know if there have been specific reasons why not, my guess is similar concerns apply there (project scope, updating, managing problems like buggy versions or forks, complexity). So at the moment instinctively I'm leaning no but am willing to consider arguments to the contrary. Blythwood (talk) 01:29, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

And Commons is for educational media, and I doubt fonts are educational. Janhrach (talk) 10:36, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Why would they not be? * Pppery * _{it has begun} 15:12, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Fonts are really complicated. My feeling is that allowing self-published fonts would be a bit like taking on publishing fanfiction or open-source software: other websites do it better, it’s of questionable value and Commons doesn’t have the contributors, time or expertise to deal with all that content moderation.
We would definitely get huge numbers of bad random self-published fonts. There are so many people who have created fonts for the imaginary language in their self-published fantasy novel. Or a font that they plan on finishing later that doesn’t even contain numbers. Or a home-brew fork of another open-source font because they don’t like the shape of the 'e'. (Those are real examples of self-published fonts I’ve run into.) Just click around on Dafont and imagine having to deal with someone bulk-uploading 86000 random fonts onto Commons and us having to decide which are worth keeping and which aren’t.
Now imagine that, plus dealing with bugs involving linguistics complexities that most people aren’t going to understand (“I know the uploader claims their font is perfect for displaying Old Gujarati script, but it actually gets all the character shaping wrong because…”). It would get even worse if we let people upload their own fonts and then call them onto Wikipedia pages, this would be a surefire way to end up with lots of text not viewable by people using screen readers and weird technical issues ("we're going to need to rewrite the article because the user wrote the Old Gujarati script snippets using their invented notation they thought was better than Unicode, so nobody can read it except using their weird font…"). And add to the attack surface for security risks too. Wikipedia articles should not serve webfonts. The best option is that people can choose themselves to set a custom font in their browser to display an article in their preferred font. Blythwood (talk) 16:02, 3 August 2024 (UTC)