User:Chris-martin/Soapbox/SVG


 * See also: Commons Transition to SVG

The visual superiority of vector graphics over rasters is clear — But, more importantly, vectors are essential to the wiki process.

WikiMedia projects are, above all, editable by anyone; the nature of a raster is contrary to this aim. Most of the images on Wikipedia, despite their imperfections, have never been significantly altered since their initial upload. This is because it is difficult to modify many graphics once they have been rendered. The text cannot be altered. Anything behind other layers is lost.

With SVG, adjustments are made very easily. However, it is not yet quite as trivial as article editing, since it requires having software, downloading a file, and uploading it again. MediaWiki has no SVG preview, so any rendering problems are unknown until the upload has completed. My hope is that eventually, MediaWiki will have an in-browser SVG-editing applet, so that Wikipedia's Image namespace will finally live up to the "anyone can edit" claim. Until then, I continue my own conversion efforts, hopefully encouraging SVG's development.