For years, I have weeped and wailed about people adding complicated maps
and diagrams as 220px thumbnail images to Wikipedia articles. These sort
of images are virtually useless within an article unless they are
displayed at relatively large sizes. Unfortunately, including them at
large sizes creates a whole new set of problems. Namely, large images
mess up the formatting of the page and cause headers, edit links, and
other images to get jumbled around into strange places (or even
overlapping each other on occasion), especially for people on tablets or
other small screens. The problem is even worse for videos. Who wants to
watch a hi-res video in a tiny 220px inline viewer? If there are
subtitles, you can't even read them. But should we instead include them
as giant 1280px players within the article? That seems like it would be
obnoxious.
What if instead we could mark such complicated images and high-res
videos to be shown in modal viewers when the user clicks on them? For
example: [[File:Highres-video1.webm|thumb|right|modal|A high res
video]]. When you clicked on the thumbnail, instead of going to Commons,
a modal viewer would overlay across the screen and let you view the
video/image at high resolution (complete with a link to Commons and the
attribution information). Believe it or not, this capability already
exists for videos on Wikipedia, but it's basically a hidden feature of
TimedMediaHandler. If you include a video in a page and set the size as
200px or less, it activates the modal behavior. Unfortunately, the
default size for videos is 220px (as of 2010) so you will almost never
see this behavior on a real article. If you want to see it, go to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language#Variation and click
on one of the videos. Compare that with the video viewing experience at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain. It's a
world of difference. Now imagine that same modal behavior at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Peak_Granodiorite#Geological_overvi…
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland.
Such an idea would be relatively trivial to implement. The steps would be:
1. Add support for a 'modal' param to the [[File:]] handler
(
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66062/)
2. Add support for the 'modal' param to TimedMediaHandler
(
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66063/)
3. Add support for the 'modal' param to images via some core JS module
(not done yet)
As you can see, I've already gotten started on adding this feature for
videos via TimedMediaHandler, but I haven't done anything for images
yet. I would like to hear people's thoughts on this potential feature
and how it could be best implemented for images before doing anything
else with it. What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas?
Ryan Kaldari