Hey Kaldari,

Thanks so much for yesterday's code fix to display videos in a modal viewer when you click on article thumbnails!

This was long overdue and makes a huge difference already, as shown in this example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain

I agree with Erik that the ideal behavior would be to play the video immediately after you click on the thumbnail, without requiring a second click to play in modal view.

Now, is there any chance we could do something similar for still photos? As a longtime photographer, it drives me nuts that clicking on a thumbnail article takes you to this overwhelming page on Commons, with scary walls of text all around the image. (That's one of the reasons I haven't yet migrated any of my 20k Flickr photos to Commons, BTW.)

Most modern web sites nowadays just show you the photo in full screen, with only a few icons around it, so you can experience the image as it was intended to be seen (typically in a black modal panel, to make it pop up more). You still have the option to reveal all the text details if you want them, but they are not forced on you as we do today on Wikipedia and Commons.

Hopefully, our new multimedia team will be able to join forces with the design team to tackle some of these commonsense UI improvements, once we get up to speed this summer.

Thanks again for this welcome prelude :)

Fabrice

_______________________________

Fabrice Florin

Product Manager, Editor Engagement

Wikimedia Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

On May 30, 2013, at 1:35 AM, wikitech-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

From: Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org>

Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles

Date: May 29, 2013 9:21:48 PM PDT

To: Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org>

Cc: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Yes, better support for display of images through a modal viewer would
be great. I'm not sure a "modal" parameter that has to be explicitly
set for files is the best approach - I would recommend optimizing the
default experience when a user clicks an image or video. It's not
clear that the current behavior based on a pixel threshold is actually
desirable as the default behavior. (On a side note, the TMH behavior
should be improved to actually play the video immediately, not require
a second click to play in modal view.)

Magnus Manske explored an alternative approach pretty extensively in
response to the October 2011 Coding Challenge, which is worth taking a
look at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/wikipic

Cheers,
Erik

From: Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org>

Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles

Date: May 30, 2013 12:42:00 AM PDT

To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Cc: Erik Moeller <emoeller@wikimedia.org>

Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

I tend to agree that a light box or other modalish zoom should become the
default behavior.

-- brion
On May 30, 2013 5:50 AM, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:

For years, I have weeped and wailed about people adding complicated maps

and diagrams as 220px thumbnail images to Wikipedia articles. These sort of

images are virtually useless within an article unless they are displayed at

relatively large sizes. Unfortunately, including them at large sizes

creates a whole new set of problems. Namely, large images mess up the

formatting of the page and cause headers, edit links, and other images to

get jumbled around into strange places (or even overlapping each other on

occasion), especially for people on tablets or other small screens. The

problem is even worse for videos. Who wants to watch a hi-res video in a

tiny 220px inline viewer? If there are subtitles, you can't even read them.

But should we instead include them as giant 1280px players within the

article? That seems like it would be obnoxious.

What if instead we could mark such complicated images and high-res videos

to be shown in modal viewers when the user clicks on them? For example:

[[File:Highres-video1.webm|**thumb|right|modal|A high res video]]. When

you clicked on the thumbnail, instead of going to Commons, a modal viewer

would overlay across the screen and let you view the video/image at high

resolution (complete with a link to Commons and the attribution

information). Believe it or not, this capability already exists for videos

on Wikipedia, but it's basically a hidden feature of TimedMediaHandler. If

you include a video in a page and set the size as 200px or less, it

activates the modal behavior. Unfortunately, the default size for videos is

220px (as of 2010) so you will almost never see this behavior on a real

article. If you want to see it, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**

American_Sign_Language#**Variation<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language#Variation>and click on one of the videos. Compare that with the video viewing

experience at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Congenital_insensitivity_to_

**pain <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain>.

It's a world of difference. Now imagine that same modal behavior at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Cathedral_Peak_Granodiorite#**

Geological_overview<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Peak_Granodiorite#Geological_overview>and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Battle_of_Jutland<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland>

.

Such an idea would be relatively trivial to implement. The steps would be:

1. Add support for a 'modal' param to the [[File:]] handler (

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/**r/#/c/66062/<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66062/>

)

2. Add support for the 'modal' param to TimedMediaHandler (

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/**r/#/c/66063/<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66063/>

)

3. Add support for the 'modal' param to images via some core JS module

(not done yet)

As you can see, I've already gotten started on adding this feature for

videos via TimedMediaHandler, but I haven't done anything for images yet. I

would like to hear people's thoughts on this potential feature and how it

could be best implemented for images before doing anything else with it.

What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas?

Ryan Kaldari

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Wikitech-l mailing list

Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l>

From: Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org>

Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles

Date: May 30, 2013 12:46:13 AM PDT

To: Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org>

Cc: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

On 5/29/13 9:21 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:

Yes, better support for display of images through a modal viewer would

be great. I'm not sure a "modal" parameter that has to be explicitly

set for files is the best approach - I would recommend optimizing the

default experience when a user clicks an image or video. It's not

clear that the current behavior based on a pixel threshold is actually

desirable as the default behavior. (On a side note, the TMH behavior

should be improved to actually play the video immediately, not require

a second click to play in modal view.)

Does anyone think it would be a bad idea to just make modal viewing the default for thumbnailed videos?

Ryan Kaldari

From: Antoine Musso <hashar+wmf@free.fr>

Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles

Date: May 30, 2013 12:52:25 AM PDT

To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Le 30/05/13 05:49, Ryan Kaldari a écrit :

When you clicked on the thumbnail, instead of going to Commons, a modal

viewer would overlay across the screen and let you view the video/image

at high resolution

<snip>

I discovered yesterday that Commons as such a tool to browse pictures in
a category.  Whenever you browse a category page such as:
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hackathons

There is a Green icon which when hovered will expand to 'show slideshow'
and when clicked replace the view with a slideshow view like Picassa /
Flickr ...

It would be nice to have that build in MediaWiki.  Maybe there is a well
supported JQuery plugin that does just that and we could ship in core?


--
Antoine "hashar" Musso

From: Antoine Musso <hashar+wmf@free.fr>

Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] showing videos and images in modal viewers within articles

Date: May 30, 2013 1:34:35 AM PDT

To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Reply-To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Le 30/05/13 09:46, Ryan Kaldari a écrit :

Does anyone think it would be a bad idea to just make modal viewing the

default for thumbnailed videos?

Be bold!  To play it safe, you can make the feature protected with a
global feature that we will slowly enable on all wiki and eventually
phase out later on :-]   This way the code will land everywhere and we
can play test it on beta then on commons ...

--
Antoine "hashar" Musso
"did I say: 'be bold' ?"


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