Topic on Talk:Page Previews/Flow

I've had two conversations on enwiki in the last few months where it has been desirable to change the image shown in a page preview to something that is not what the tool identifies as the first image in an article. For simplicity: imagine that we don't have an image of Actor X, but midway down their article we talk about their comedy duo work with Actor Y (pictured) and so Actor Y is shown in the Page Preview, clearly misleading as the person doesn't match the name. The only solutions are getting a picture of Actor X (could be literally impossible) or removing all images from the article (could be very undesirable). At least, those are the only solutions I'm aware of.

To me the obvious solution would be a magic word or something that we can encapsulate in a template so that I can write {{PagePreview|None}} to have no image in the page preview, and ideally I can also write {{PagePreview|Image.jpg}} to override the first image as preview and instead use Image.jpg.

It is hugely undesirable for the only solution to be changing the primary rendered article layout in order to accommodate for a secondary layout feature like Page Previews.

I'd be delighted, of course, if there is any other solution and I'm just not aware of it, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.

(Please ping me or do something that gives me a cross-wiki notification so I'll notice replies to this.)

@Bilorv: another solution is only use the infobox image

@Bilorv, you said imagine that we don't have an image of Actor X, but midway down their article we talk about their comedy duo work with Actor Y (pictured) and so Actor Y is shown in the Page Preview. Please clarify whether you have actually seen this happen recently?

I discussed this exact issue with the developers, and I believe it was fixed abut five years ago. PageImage should only be grabbing images from the lead section. Ah... I found the Phab tasks to fix this. See task T87336 on the issue, and fix-deployment in task T152115.

Ah sorry @Alsee, I didn't know it only grabs images from the lead. This was the reason I didn't want to add an image to an article but I didn't actually test it out and check. I guess that reduces the number of uses of this but there is still a more complex case on en:Pornhub where consensus is changing but there was a suggestion at one point that might reasonably have been the one with consensus where an infobox image identified as the first in the page (a screenshot of the website) would have been kept in the article, but suppressed from the Page Previews (so that no image would be shown, or possibly a custom-specified image). Possibly less contrived is en:Talk:2020 Labour Party leadership election (UK)#Main image where we would have liked to omit an image to avoid seeming to give preference to one candidate in a current election.

These each seem like a concrete use case which is impossible to implement at the moment. Or am I wrong on this too?

Yes, displaying one candidate in election articles (and other cases) is a serious problem. It makes Wikipedia appear grossly biased, it affects a fairly significant number of articles, and it creates a severe dilemma for editors. I raised that issue around he same time (about 5 years ago), but it never got traction with the devs.

We definitely need some way to control, override, or exclude image selection, or to ensure images are not displayed unless the required multiple images are displayed side-by-side. In particular I'd say it needs to be some kind of fix or option we can add in a template, to address all new and open election articles at once.

I don't know if staff are still watching this page and active on this project. If someone from the Foundation doesn't pick up on this task soon, it might help to organized a community call to get this fixed.

Here's an example how page preview can lead to problems: the article "Beg bugs" has a hyperlink in the lead for "Skin rashes" and if you hover over it with page preview on, it shows the image in the lead there. BUT that image of a skin rash looks nothing like the skin rash that bed bugs produce. So a person hovering over the link and scanning quickly might end up misinformed about bed bugs by assuming the image is apropos when it is not.

I do not know how this could be solved. Some possible avenues would be to extended the wikilink syntax to include other parameters (perhaps the best but would be a big change) or to wrap the link in a template that controls the page preview behavior (ugly solution).

@Jason Quinn also yesterday I was reading w:en:The Ultimate Gift and hovered over "Ali Hillis" on its infobox, the only things you can see in the preview image is her chest and half of her face.