Talk:Community Wishlist/W215

This wish has been added to a focus area

When clicking on the file-info button, open the Wikimedia Commons page directly wish has been added to the Better stitching between Commons and other projects focus area. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 14:34, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Only some files do not open Commons page directly

So I checked the example image 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.

So I meant to ask whether it would be possible to move this wish to "When opening a file/image in a new tab, open the Wikimedia Commons page directly".

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), it still opens the intermediary page instead of the Commons page. Images in that same article also open in the MediaViewer like the one at top of the Cosmology article. However, not all of them: the image right above the Gallery section with caption "A logarithmic map of the observable universe" also opens some intermediary page instead of Commons directly. I thought maybe it was changed for images but not videos but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Could somebody explain this?

It would of course be best if this is slowly getting changed so that the Commons page is linked directly but currently it seems like it can be this way or that way with no criteria or explanation why in an inconsistent way. Maybe it even varies per time so some files link to Commons for some times and to intermediary pages – without categories, with red links, and not on the Commons site that's hardly known by many – at random other times. Maybe it would be good to add some info to the wish and/or change the title depending on what the explanation for this is. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:11, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

Do you (not) have "Redirect image links to Commons for files hosted there" enabled in your preferences? --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 06:23, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

No, I don't. I haven't checked every single setting. If there already is a setting about this all the better and thanks for providing this info: then this issue would be only about changing the default (including for logged-out users). Prototyperspective (talk) 12:04, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

My comment was meant merely as a debugging hint since you pointed out some inconsistencies in observed behavior. I am not really suggesting that your wish can be fulfilled just by flipping that switch on for everyone (not everyone would agree that's a solution anyway). --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:49, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

Why

"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."

No, the feature far predates any concern about search indexing. Proxying of Commons description pages was introduced in July 2005 by River Tarnell. There were two reasons, as I recall. The first was that this predated CentralAuth, so if we linked to Commons, you would likely not be logged in. They were completely separate authentication domains. The second was that this predated GlobalUsage, so the Commons page had no backlinks. The local description pages had backlinks. Note that the feature also predated MediaViewer, so at the time, clicking on the image itself would always take you to the local description page. That was the only way readers had to zoom in. So such clicks were relatively common. Tim Starling (WMF) (talk) 22:56, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the explanations! Given that the rationale for the introduction now is obsolete, this is more reason to implement the proposed change which would substantially benefit both readers and the Wikimedia Commons project. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:00, 3 June 2025 (UTC)