On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 10:37 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff@gmail.com> wrote:

Commons currently uses tool labs for this (See the interactive large
image viewer like, on e.g.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:South_Station,_Elevated,_and_Dewey_Square.jpg
). I'm sure this would be a cool feature for media viewer. I doubt its
going to happen in the near future based on current priorities

Even when MediaViewer was resourced, this feature never made the cut (you can see the plans at T77151). It would be a fairly large project, and compared to other large reader-centric media projects (such as a better video player, or structured media data) the impact seems a lot smaller.

Assuming there were mentors and students who wanted to do that, and we
decide we want mediawiki to be able to serve tiles of images (Not
entirely clear if we do).

I don't see why we wouldn't want the capability; it's required if we want to provide a high-quality multimedia user experience. Whether it would be part of MediaWiki proper or some kind of microservice is an implementation detail.