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Technology report

Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia

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By Adam Cuerden and Kirill Lokshin

Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery> markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.

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Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery> to <gallery mode=packed> produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.

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In addition, the heights parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px> gives

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Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.

Packed-hover (move your mouse over the images below)
  • The captions
    The captions
  • appear when
    appear when
  • you
    you
  • mouse over
    mouse over
Packed-overlay
  • The
    The
  • captions
    captions
  • are
    are
  • always there
    always there

It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.

VisualEditor enhancements

  • Faster loading: The VisualEditor continues to improve its loading speed and update speed during editing. If you haven't used VisualEditor in a while, it's a good time to give it another try, to see how it's improved.
  • Enhanced language and script support: Language and script support in VisualEditor has been improved. A number of reported bugs that affected adding text to pages in languages which use non-Latin and non-Cyrillic scripts, such as Arabic or Korean, or Input Method Editors, such as Vietnamese, have now been resolved with a re-write of some of VisualEditor's infrastructure.
  • Efforts to implement cross-page copy-pasting continue: The VisualEditor team has been implementing numerous incremental improvements to VisualEditor's copy-paste infrastructure throughout the past week. Direct copying and pasting between pages through the VisualEditor interface is expected to be fully supported in the near future.

In brief

This video (the 1911 film Little Nemo) will expand out when you click on it, for easy viewing.
  • Expanding video thumbnails: Video files which have been thumbnailed to less than 800 pixels in width will now automatically expand to fill more of the screen when viewed, providing readers a better viewing experience. This feature is currently exclusive to English Wikipedia, but is expected to appear on other projects in the near future.
  • Notifications enabled for mobile users: Support for notifications has been enabled in the mobile interface for all Echo-enabled projects. Mobile users will now have access to additional communication features, such as notification of talk page mentions, that are already available to non-mobile users.
  • Campaign infrastructure improvements planned for Commons: Improvements to the "campaigns" namespace have been proposed for Commons. The proposed infrastructure will allow programs like Wikipedia Loves Monuments to easily preformat file information and document uploads. Although a basic form exists already, the proposed changes should vastly improve the efficiency and usability of the namespace.
  • Syntax highlighting added: Automatic syntax highlighting on JavaScript pages, CSS pages, and Lua modules is now available through the CodeEditor interface. The new feature is not dependent on VisualEditor, and is available for all users through the standard editing window.
  • Improvements made to search implementation: A number of enhancements have been made to the Wikimedia search infrastructure in an effort to make it more reliable. With the backend having been improved, new user-facing features, like the ability to search within a category, are planned. As with many new enhancements, the rollout is gradual, starting with MediaWiki; it is expected to be some time before the enhancements reach the English Wikipedia.
  • Secure login for (nearly) everyone: Following reports that Wikipedia had been used by the National Security Agency as a source for tracking users' behavior, secure login has been enabled for most users. This enhancement should help protect users from monitoring, prevent Wikipedia content being changed by a third party before it reaches them, and stop their edits from being modified before they reach Wikipedia. Users in Iran and China will continue to use unsecure login, as their governments block the secure site.
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  • The Module namespace has used CodeEditor since launch. The new addition is for CSS and JS pages. Anomie⚔ 14:23, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The packed-hover is a good tech. Nice additions. Benison talk with me 15:10, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wow, the new gallery is amazing! I quite like it. — -dainomite   16:55, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The new galleries are beautiful - well done to all involved. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:14, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Quite appropriate that Adam should demonstrate it with some of his own restorations, since it's often files like that which don't conform to standard dimensions (like #3, above) and you really notice the difference in galleries with the whitespace.. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 12:13, 1 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Heh, well, it's a bit hard to find a really oddly-proportioned gallery on Wikipedia, because they looked so awful with the old gallery style, but I've had a gallery of FPs on my user page for years. Adam Cuerden (talk) 13:15, 1 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • See also the galleries on mobile view. "Packed-hover" looks strange. --Atlasowa (talk) 20:30, 1 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I suspect that's an issue with one caption taking up two lines in that example. Mobile view, as I understand it, strips most gallery code. Adam Cuerden (talk) 21:01, 1 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • At WikiProject Open Access some of us organize a "file of the day" and put new non-text media into a gallery daily. I just changed this to a packed gallery and the images are slow to load and some do not load at all. This is on Commons, not Wikipedia. See Commons:Commons:Open_Access_File_of_the_Day. Where are conversations about this tag? Nothing is happening at Help_talk:Gallery_tag. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:07, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Packed-hover behaves like packed-overlay on my iPad. Known issue? - PKM (talk) 01:56, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Should have mentioned: On the mobile site, that's a planned change, since many touchscreens don't have a hover-over option. Adam Cuerden (talk) 05:14, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Category search

"new user-facing features, like the ability to search within a category, are planned"

Great news! :) Now it would be cool to make it even easier to search by crossing many categories, and allowing searching subcategories as well. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:54, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

From conversations, it sounds like those are planned, but realise this is very early stages: The old search was a mess, so it had to be rewritten into a stable version before any other improvements could be done. We're going to get new search features, but I don't think anyone can promise anything until coding's a lot further on. =) Adam Cuerden (talk) 19:24, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Adam Cuerden: How is this any different from incategory:? πr2 (t • c) 20:28, 2 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That you'd need to ask the developers about. I would presume it would include subcategories, perhaps? Adam Cuerden (talk) 20:04, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What we are talking about is incategory:, yes. The major difference we've accomplished here (which I think was lost in the blurb) is that we've made it possible to have multiple incategory: terms in a single search, opening the door for category intersections. ^demon[omg plz] 02:17, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]


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