On 9/9/06, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hello all,
I think we all saw them. Clickable images.
Er, yes, however it is not clear to me if you're referring to any new technical feature? I'm only familiar with the [[Template:Click]] hack used on the English Wikipedia, which has been around since December 2005 and does not work in all browsers. The relevant Bugzilla entry is http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=539 and there is no indication that it has been fixed. Am I missing something? If you're referring to [[Template:Click]], I advise against using it for compatibility reasons. After all, clickable images have been supported in web browsers for a while ;-); resorting to CSS hacks to implement them seems barely justifiable.
There's been a lot of discussion already about how navigational images could be implemented while preserving image credit. The best strategy I've seen would be to have an extension, Special:Mediacredits, which, called with a page title as a parameter, would transclude all the description pages of the images and other media used on that page. A page-dependent link to the Special:Imagecredits page would then be inserted into the sidebar and/or page footer.
I don't think images that function as links to other pages necessarily represent a usability problem. After all, thumbnails normally also have a little "zoom" icon, which creates the expectation that clicking the image gives a larger version (which it does). Navigational images do not have this "zoom" icon, so the reader expectation is more likely to be that they take you to another page, which, however, they currently do not.
So I think the current use of images on the Main Pages, in infoboxes, etc. in fact represents a usability problem that could be addressed with a clean implementation of images as links. In fact, it's especially bad on the English Wikipedia, where clicking a frontpage photo like the Space Shuttle not only takes me to an image description page, it also shows me a complex warning:
This image has been temporarily uploaded as a crop from Image:STS-115 Launch.jpg so that its subject can be easily visible at a thumb scale while on the Main Page. For licensing information, please view the main image description. Images on the main page are protected due to their high visibility. Please discuss any necessary changes on the discussion page. Administrators: please speedy delete this file once it is definitely off the Main Page.
Thousands of readers see confusing messages like this when they expect to see articles. That cannot be a good thing.