Reading/Web/Projects/PageImagesChanges

Background:

A number of issues have been reported with the PageImages API, which result in a PageImage set for the page which might be improper or out of context with the page itself. These issues have been highlighted in the following places, as well as through other tasks which have been merged with the current efforts:

Example:

Consider the English Wikipedia article w:en:Abbey Road. Currently, the page image of the article is the image displayed below, which, while related to the topic, cannot be said to represent the article as a whole, which is the goal of PageImages:

This is due to two issues within the page images selection:

Currently, only free images are allowed to appear for PageImages.
In the absence of a free image within the article’s summary, the page image is set from the remainder of the article and, therefore, can often be out of context (as in the Abbey Road example above)

Next Steps:

To limit for these issues, the reading-web team is making the following changes to the PageImages API:

Allowing Non-Free images to appear when allowed

Currently, the PageImages API only allows for free images to be displayed. However, for certain features, such as hovercards, communities have expressed interest in allowing non-free images to appear as well. We will be adding a parameter to the PageImages API to allow for both free and non-free images, so we can configure for:

Displaying only free images
Displaying both free and non-free images

The configuration will be determined based on individual feature and community consensus. This change will be applied early to mid December, 2016 More information here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131105 and at the API documentation page.

Allowing PageImages to be set only from the lead section or infobox of an article

To tackle the appearance of images out of context, we will be limiting the sources of the images for the API. As most images past the lead section or infobox of an article tend to pertain to the section they are describing, rather than the article as a whole, they are often not appropriate to be set as the image for the entire page.

This change will be applied early to mid December, 2016 More information here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87336

Allowing editors to set the PageImage for a page

To ensure full coverage over inappropriate or out of context page images, we will be allowing editors to overwrite the page image set by the API with a specific image of their choice.

This change will be applied Jan - Feb, 2016 More informations here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91683