On Sunday 05 January 2003 04:00 am, brion vibber wrote:
> The obvious thing is to include the larger image in the image
> description page of the smaller image (and hence the click-through from
> articles containing the smaller image), and this is *exactly* what a
> number of people started doing when the image upload system was first
> put in place.
>
> For reasons still not clear to me, a number of prominent members of the
> Wikipedia community found this to be anathema and stamped out the
> practice.
That was LDC's call and I have just been following through on enforcing the
image policy he wrote (and which wasn't opposed to by anyone on the mailing
list BTW). At first I too wanted to place the larger image in the image
description page of the smaller image but LDC convinced me that this isn't a
good idea since it would cultivate an expectation in visitors that clicking
on an image will bring them to a page that has a larger version of the same
image when in fact most images in Wikipedia do not have larger versions at
all (then visitors soon wouldn't know what to expect). Enforcing this leaves
us with a more consistent situation: Image description pages are where the
descriptions and copyright info for the images are. If you want to have a
link to a larger version of the image then provide a media link in the
article itself.
I still am not too happy with the situation though since it flies in the face
of the webstandard that if you click on an image you are usually taken to a
larger version of that image.
It would be nice if this behavior were made to be a bit smarter: if an image
is displayed on the image description page of foo.jpg then mouse pointers
become little hands when over image foo.jpg in an article and clicking once
brings you to the image description page (this is the current behavior for
all images). But if there is no image displayed on the image description page
of foo.jpg ([[:image:foo.jpg]]) then mouse pointers would /not/ become little
hands when over displayed image foo.jpg and a person would have to click the
image twice to get to the image description page.
It would also be nice to have any text in [[:image:foo.jpg]] be displayed as
mouse over text whenever a mouse pointer is over the displayed foo.jpg (with
or without an image displayed [[:image:foo.jpg]]).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)