[Mediawiki-l] Why Facebook and others can't see a wiki's most important image

[jidanni at jidanni.org]

Gentlemen, try it yourself.
In Facebook share a link to a MediaWiki wiki or article.
Is the picture that appears to the right of the link what you expect?
Why can't it offer the site logo as one of the choices?
> Go report it to Facebook, Holmes.
Well Facebook is rather big compared to MediaWiki, they can't hear
little voices like mine, so maybe MediaWiki could make some adjustments
on the MediaWiki side.

The problem is even worse when quoting a MediaWiki URL in a Facebook
comment. In this case one ends up with the wretched "Powered by
MediaWiki" logo as the only choice, despite ones painstaking crafted
site logo.

When quoting Wikipedia in a FB comment one ends up with equivalent gunk
from the bottom of the page.

Try it yourself. FB started putting image "previews" in comments last week.

Looking further into the problem, we see it all stems from MediaWiki
(people, staff, you), non-knowledge of how text browsers or search
engines work.
> We know how they work, but they don't matter because all we know is
> how things look in our browser

Can you believe that text browser users are denied any knowledge of the
site logo either? No blip on the screen like there might be for a normal
image. Nothing.
> Yeah, well there is no reason for anybody to use a text browser, so screw 'em

The most important image on an entire MediaWiki site, and it lays
wrapped up in some <!-- logo --> markup that makes big assumptions <!--/logo -->.

Ha Ha, Ha Ha, told you so *for years*. Now when anybody quotes a
MediaWiki article on Facebook, there is a 95% chance it will look bad...
serves you all right! Plus (Google+? Dare not also test it there to see
what happens), it is NOT a Facebook bug. Ho Ho Ho. Muhahaha.

Ho Ha, Q: what are the goofiest looking links on Facebook? A: MediaWiki links!