Problem: SVG images are currently rendered as scalar images before being displayed in Wikipedia articles, because at the time SVG support was added, many browsers could not reliably display SVGs. That rendering is currently being done by librsvg 2.40.x, which was deprecated in 2017, and which causes compatibility issues with lots of modern SVG images. Upgrading to a newer version has been blocked by the fact that the Thumbor thumbnailing system has no maintainer and is still running on Debian Stretch, despite the Wikimedia operating system upgrade policy saying that Stretch should've been phased out by June 2021, and Debian marking Stretch as End of life in June of 2022. An effort to replace librsvg altogether has stalled due to lack of WMF developer support for Thumbor.
Proposed solution: Proposed solution is threefold:
Find a maintainer for Thumbor and upgrade it to a modern operating system (likely Bullseye at this point, since Buster deprecation is supposed to begin later this year)
Evaluate and implement a new SVG renderer
Since all modern browsers have robust SVG support, allow SVGs to be displayed directly without conversion to scaler images under certain circumstances (the SVG is smaller in file size than the equivalent raster thumbnail, the SVG does not contain <text></text> tags since that can create issues with installed fonts and the systemLanguage attribute, etc.)
Who would benefit: Anyone that creates SVG images, adds SVG images to articles, or reads articles that would benefit from better SVG rendering.
