Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections. I wonder whether it would be unreasonable to request that Wikipedia support two (or three?) flavors of delivery, chosen in Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics, and perhaps no graphics?
Perhaps an additional possibility would be to have things be more relative. Right now there is a default size, but it's not usually used, because it seems to be smaller than what most people are using. But hard-coding pixel values is a bad idea, because peoples' monitors and preferred reading sizes and so on vary, so they really should be relative somehow. And once we have a relative coding scheme, it's easy to add an option that says "show me all images 50% smaller".
The main problem I see with making thumbnails smaller all around is that really small thumbnails are often pretty useless, often not any better than simply a text link to the full-sized picture, because you can't see anything on the tiny thumbnail.
-Mark