[Foundation-l] Clickable images

[Erik Moeller]

On 9/9/06, effe iets anders <effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I think we all saw them. Clickable images.

Er, yes, however it is not clear to me if you're referring to any new
technical feature? I'm only familiar with the [[Template:Click]] hack
used on the English Wikipedia, which has been around since December
2005 and does not work in all browsers. The relevant Bugzilla entry is
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539
and there is no indication that it has been fixed. Am I missing
something? If you're referring to [[Template:Click]], I advise against
using it for compatibility reasons. After all, clickable images have
been supported in web browsers for a while ;-); resorting to CSS hacks
to implement them seems barely justifiable.

There's been a lot of discussion already about how navigational images
could be implemented while preserving image credit. The best strategy
I've seen would be to have an extension, Special:Mediacredits, which,
called with a page title as a parameter, would transclude all the
description pages of the images and other media used on that page. A
page-dependent link to the Special:Imagecredits page would then be
inserted into the sidebar and/or page footer.

I don't think images that function as links to other pages necessarily
represent a usability problem. After all, thumbnails normally also
have a little "zoom" icon, which creates the expectation that clicking
the image gives a larger version (which it does). Navigational images
do not have this "zoom" icon, so the reader expectation is more likely
to be that they take you to another page, which, however, they
currently do not.

So I think the current use of images on the Main Pages, in infoboxes,
etc. in fact represents a usability problem that could be addressed
with a clean implementation of images as links. In fact, it's
especially bad on the English Wikipedia, where clicking a frontpage
photo like the Space Shuttle not only takes me to an image description
page, it also shows me a complex warning:

 This image has been temporarily uploaded as a crop from Image:STS-115
 Launch.jpg so that its subject can be easily visible at a thumb scale
while on the
 Main Page. For licensing information, please view the main image description.
 Images on the main page are protected due to their high visibility.
Please discuss
 any necessary changes on the discussion page. Administrators: please speedy
 delete this file once it is definitely off the Main Page.

Thousands of readers see confusing messages like this when they expect
to see articles. That cannot be a good thing.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik