Hi,

I'm trying to find a way to put an (external) hyperlink and/or a wikilink directly on an image. There are two reasons:

a) In lots of templates in the Wikipeda sites, icons are used to make the textual content more visually appealing. However, those icons always point to themself (their description page), and not to the content they represent. This seems to irritate lots of users which click on the icons - as they are used from other software GUIs - but don't get where they intend to get.

b) I'd like to link images directy to other pages inside MediaWiki. (Fictual) example: The article "physiology of cats" includes several detailled shots of the cat's anatomy etc.; I'd like to link those images directly to the in-depth articles about "eyes of cats", "nose of cats", etc. Especially, I'd like to avoid to require the user to read the thumbnail's description an click on an adaequate Wikilink embedded in this description.

c) I'm drafting a "new" interface to the Wikipedia's content, which will be based on a radically visual approach to locate content (opposed to the mostly textual approach currently used). In short, The idea behind this is, that you might want to know something about a thing you don't have a name for. Example: On a wall, you see a sign; you don't know how it is called and thus can't look it up since you don't know the matching term (e.g. when you are on vacation in a country where a language is used that you can't read); however, you can describe th sign: it's shape is square with rounded edges, it's colour is blue, it contains bold letters and numbers in white and some lines. With a visual interface, you can look up "shape" -> "shape with colour" -> "shape with colour and letters and numbers"; now, most probably you will be close to similar things and you might have a chance to visually identify the sign - without needing any terms so far (such signs are used in Germany to indicate access to water pipelines; I really have no idea how they are called ;). Such an (mostly language independent) interface would only work, if images could be hotlinked to other images, or categories, or articles, or even external websites.

If I'm right, the default and only behaviour of MedaWiki is, to hyperlink images to their description page. As I understand, inside a MedaWiki site, the ony way to work around this is to use one of the image map extensions (opposed to vanilla HTML).

However, the syntax

[http://www.example.com [[Image:some_image.jpg|300px|Description]]]

seems to work, at least under MedaiWiki 1.10.x. With this syntax, the thumbnail itself is still linked to the description page, but there appears the "external hyperlink" icon which points to http://www.example.com. Major drawback of this workaround: the user has to locate the "external hyperlink" icon and click on it (obviously, this is kind of sub-optimal).

Obviously also, the image map extensions are by far "oversized" for this matter; is there another, simpler and faster way to accomplish this in MediaWiki?

Thanks & regards, -asb

PS: I hope I was able to give you an idea what I'm trying to accomplish; if not, please feel free to ask ;)