Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Clickable images
historical reference. . Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump |
The Template:Click was fixed in 2008. And now, MediaWiki offers a good syntax to change the link of an image, through the |link=
parameter. This is no longer a problem.
Original introduction
Usually, when you click on any image of Wikipedia you go to the image description page, where you can find a lot of info about it like the source, the license, or a full size version. However, a template —
Template:Click was proposed for deletion, many times and per [1],[2] there was no consensus.
We aren't against clickable images, we are against this template because it is bad for Wikipedia. In fact, its seems MediaWiki has special syntax for clickable images (of course, with no accessibility or browser compatibility problems), but it is disabled in the Wikipedia (I suppose due to copyright and usability problems). See an example of this syntax at
Related work: Wikipedia:HiddenStructure (another hack that had to be removed in the English Wikipedia because it had accessibility and browser-compatibility problems)
Problems caused
- Accessibility: Those links can't be read by all screen readers, so blind wikipedians can't follow them.
- Usability: Breaks the user notion of "clicking on every image I go to its description page".
- Browser compatibility: It doesn't work in text-only browsers, and in screen readers for the disabled as explained above, and possibly other situations.
- Copyright: Image descriptions cannot be reached, so their license isn't available.
Can't it be fixed?
The template cannot be modified to fix all these problems. Moreover, template:click is used in different types of situations, so trying to fix some problems in one of them will break all the other pages. So the best (an only solution at this moment) is to replace the pages using this template.
The <imagemap>
tag provided by the ImageMap extension can now be used to create clickable images. This also works in templates.
Technical info
Template:Click attempts to superimpose an invisible link to an off/site page or a page link in "title=" form on an image. The technique of using
See also m:Template:Click, and Bug 539: Allow images that link somewhere other than the image page.
Methodology
We have replaced (or are going to replace) pages using Template:Click with equivalent contents. The proposed ideas successfully fixed
Status
I'm proud to say there are promising advances: template:click has nearly disappeared from articles, and it is only used in portals and user pages. The objective of project was to remove this template completely, or at least to use it only when "absolutely necessary" (I'm optimistic, I think it can be completely removed).
Similar templates were successfully removed, as you know: Template:Wikisourcesmall, Template:Noclick.
You can help!
Please see this page's talk page for activities underway to fix other instances of this issue. If we have replaced the clickable image without adding the link please, let us know to fix it.