On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 4:57 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske(a)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:Meinungsbil…
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.
- - -
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
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation