Hello all, I'd like to talk about the default gallery settings, and the technical feasibility of updating them. By default in MediaWiki, they are 120 pixel height, 120 pixel width: * https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/includes/SetupDynamicConfig.php#L115-L123 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgGalleryOptions
This is, in retrospect, too small. It's fine for something like a gallery of simple images that display well at low resolutions like flags, but it's woefully undersized for the far more common case of detailed artwork, photographs, screenshots, etc. Many other user-facing websites have adopted to show larger pictures when possible, backed by consumer studies. Other wikis often increase the default gallery size. 200x200 would be a better default (or possibly even larger!). What would be required to merge a change of this? Ideally for all WMF projects on MediaWiki, or all Wikipedias, but the English language edition of Wikipedia would also work. There's an old Phabricator ticket filed in 2012 (!) asking for permission to increase the Hebrew Wikipedia default gallery size: * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T43712 And judging by the file currently used, it seems Swedish Wikipedia already has a larger size: * https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/operations/mediawiki-config/+/refs/heads/master/wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php#11383 However, I was warned that it's possible the default image thumbnailer might need to be updated to create thumbnails at whatever the new default is. There's a 2013 comment in the above Phabricator thread saying that different language editions shouldn't use different thumbnail sizes to prevent needlessly creating tons of files. That said, this ship has already sailed - tons of galleries already custom-set larger sizes, and Module:Gallery on English Wikipedia even tries to use 180x180 as the default for when people use a template to create a Gallery. More generally, what are the sizes of thumbnails already created by default? If there's truly a desire to not create a new default image size, fine, let's set the gallery default to some value that's already being created (say, 220x220?). That won't cause any additional load, then. It might even reduce load, since fewer editors will feel the need to adjust gallery sizes upward manually to random bespoke sizes. I'd like to get this change eventually merged in. If there's anything else stopping just changing the above setting to a larger default, or stakeholders who'd need to be convinced, would be happy to hear feedback. (Context: We had a hacking night at the NYC Wikimedia chapter, and this list was recommended as a good place to take the temperature of this proposal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Hacking_Night_January_2024 .) -SnowFire _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
