Open the Wikimedia Commons file page directly (Community Wishlist/W215/en)
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When clicking on the button encircled in red underneath any media file (image, video, other) or opening the file in a new tab, please open the Wikimedia Commons page directly instead of showing some intermediate Wikipedia page.
In this case, when clicking on it from Cosmology, en:File:The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.jpg is opened rather than Commons:File:The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.jpg. One first has to click on "description page there" in the box underneath the image that says "This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. Information from its description page there is shown below.". I think most users don't do so and whether or not is somewhat irrelevant: this is a redundant intermediary step that is not helpful.
- The main problem is that this page does not include the WMC categories of the file. These can be very useful to the reader, for example to find more images of the same series or to find similar images, to get some contextual information / metadata on the image such as the year taken, and so on. Files are laboriously organized using these categories and there's no reason to not show them on the page shown when clicking on file info.
- In addition, wikilinks can be dysfunctional (redlinks) when they are links to other pages on Commons such as to Help pages, galleries, category pages, and so on. This means because of this intermediary page, it's quite common that wikilinks in it are redlinks.
- Another less severe problem with these unnecessary intermediate pages is that the Other versions are listed vertically when they neatly displayed in a horizontal gallery in the Commons page (example: compare this with this).
- Even more problematic than the lack of categories on this pages is that users are kept away from Commons for no reason, meaning far less people learn about the existence of Commons and starting using and/or contributing to it. When on Commons, you see it's a separate website, it has a different logo, and various helpful links to get started and learn more in the sidebar and other places. Basically, by not linking to it directly the community is keeping itself down by suppressing success of the Commons project. Relatively small change – big impact.
Maybe the reason for this intermediary page is that Google and DuckDuckGo nearly don't index media on WMC so having an intermediary WP page improves this a bit at least for those files that are used on some Wikipedia. Otherwise, I can't see any potential reason why these intermediate pages are used but if there are more, I doubt these could not be addressed in other ways.
When clicking on "More details" in the Media Viewer (after clicking on the image), the WMC page is opened directly. Also I noticed the button highlighted above has different functions from time to time – sometimes it opens the intermediary page and sometimes it opens the image in the Media Viewer. Lastly, if the Media Viewer is deactivated please also open the WMC page directly instead of putting this page in between.
Update: Only some files do not open Commons page directly. I checked the image in the example and when I clicked the button underneath the image it does open the file in the MediaViewer now which has a Details button that links to the Commons page which is good. It only does not open the Commons page when I open the file in a new tab like many (could be most) probably often do. However, I then tested another article – Observable universe. There, when I click on the file-info button beneath the video in the "Large-scale structure" section (not in a new tab) or the image at the bottom, it still opens the intermediary page instead of the Commons page. I think the behavior should be consistent and the intermediate page be deprecated due to issues pointed out here.
Similar wish: Shortcut for images from Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons.
Unassigned
Wikipedia readers, WMC contributors, Wikipedia editors that could find useful images
- Created: 23:11, 4 August 2024
- Last updated: 01:56, 12 December 2025
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)
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