On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 4:57 PM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
It's probably fine for "modern" viewing, although it's hard to guess that you get to the file page via the little Commons icon for people who (in all likelihood) have never seen that icon, or visited Commons.
Dear Magnus,
Thanks as always for your thoughtful comments. It was great to see you at Wikimania again, too. :)
Indeed, the icon to the File: page is currently very opaque. We're preparing for a round of possible changes to the viewing experience, potentially including - moving caption above the fold so readers don't have to hunt for it - moving disable action above-the-fold - potentially eliminating the below-the-fold panel entirely - emphasizing the File: page more prominently as the canonical source of metadata - separating out download/use actions more clearly
These changes will need to be carefully tested/validated. If you want to take a look at an early early (!) prototype (!!), see http://multimedia-alpha.wmflabs.org/wiki/Lightbox_demo , but please note that anything but the basic view experience is placeholder right now (as is the "Details" icon etc.), and the caption-above-the-fold is not implemented yet. We've looked at some of this with folks at Wikimania, and the community feedback there was very positive. But like I said, give us a bit more time on this.
In general, Giles made a good point at the multimedia roundtable at Wikimania: Historically, product development at WMF was so slow that calling for an immediate rollback of a new thing that doesn't work quite perfectly yet for everyone was a bit more appropriate. Nowadays we really can push out a new release in a few weeks, and the constant turning on/off is not helpful for anyone, especially for a feature like this that can easily be disabled by anyone who doesn't like it.
In answer to your query regarding how we communicated about this, please note that we posted the following at the beginning of the poll: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_Diskussion:Meinungsbild...
Translation: The Wikimedia Foundation reserves the right to make a final decision about the standard configuration of software features in Wikimedia projects (see [[m:Limits to configuration changes]]). For the avoidance of doubt: This includes hacks implemented via the MediaWiki: namespace. Of course want to find a solution that is acceptable for readers and editors. We are open to the idea that the default setting for logged in users and logged out users should be different.
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I don't think we could have been any clearer that a MediaWiki: disable hack would not be acceptable -- we said so from the start. We did indeed agree to implement a different default configuration for logged in users for Wikimedia Commons, given the unique nature of the project. We would strongly advise against doing the same for logged in users on Wikipedia projects, and decided not to do so in response to the vote on de.wp. While settling on a compromise like this may be tempting in the short term to de-escalate matters, let's only do it if it's truly the right thing to do, not for political reasons alone.
Erik