Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Muhammad images/Functional hatnote demo

Thoughts and Questions on OfferToHideImages
Hello HectorMoffet, I found your OfferToHideImages.js and tested it. I really admire your constructive approach to the issue! My favourite thing in your script is that the space of each hidden image is preserved, it still has the captions and gets an "Unhide All images" offer with a link. So the user can see that an image is hidden and can decide to unhide. Well done! I also like that the script treats all images equally and that it does not possess any memory. That being said, i oppose the proposals in Requests for comment/Muhammad images that would add hatnotes to the top of the article Muhammad and others. I think question 1b is a bit ambiguous on how a "functional hatnote" would be implemented - if by media-wiki or in wiki markup (then i oppose it for reasons of NPOV, compare Talk:Muhammad/images/Archive_17), if by user script (then i would support it, but every user can use scripts already without asking my opinion). I think hatnotes in some articles to indicate "controversial images" belong to the bigger debate about the removal or filtering of "controversial images/content" (which i assume you know, huge controversy!). Maybe clarify?

Now, back to the technical side. Your script enables the user to hide images on each article (Global Mode) or on selected articles (List mode), but he can only choose to hide images after opening the article, not beforehand. So the user cannot really evade to see the lead image (or more, depending on his display). There are other user scripts that have tried to solve this "controversial images" debate in a different way, for example by blurring all images unless the user (mouse) hovers over the image (very fast blur/unblur!). Other approaches to hiding unwanted images: User:Mr.Z-man/badimages (hides the individual images from "badimagelist" on every page), User:Ll0l00l/gadget-gif-hider.js (hides gif-images after mouse-out from image box and unhides by mouse-in, to hide distracting animated gifs like on Temperature; it has become a user preferences gadget "Disable animations in the interface"), User:Eraserhead1/HideImages.js (you probably already saw that), User:LinguistAtLarge/imagetoggle.js (doesn't work?), de:Benutzer:Malte_Schierholz/reftoggle.js (to hide/unhide references, not images, by cookie while browsing). Another very interesting feature can be seen on the "mobile Wikipedia" frontend (hardcoded): Go to https://en.m.wikipedia.org and at the end of the page "Disable images on mobile site". It turns off all images while you browse mobile Wikipedia, until you click on "Enable images on mobile site" (at the same place). Unfortunately, by disabling images on mobile frontend the image disappears completely: no placeholder, no caption, no link to unhide the image. So all images, even the math formula (image) in the "definition" section of http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale disappear without a trace if you disable images. In this respect, I think your script is far better. On the other hand, I like that you can go to the mobile Main Page (i.e.) and disable images before you search for arachnophobia, Mohammed or a medical condition - and thereby prevent to see images in the results that might disturb you. All in all I think these concepts have different advantages and disadvantages. I would love to see a combination that is easy to use and to understand and is useful for a wide variety of cases where users (and IP users in the future?) would like to not see images. I think a (hardcoded like "print article" or user gadget) option to hide all images would be neutral and have majority support (see meta:Controversial_content/Brainstorming). Another interesting functionality could be asynchronous image loading with placeholders Bug 32138. Maybe your "OfferToHideImages" (Global Mode) including the unhide-all-images-placeholders, but active not just on the actual page but all while browsing (like on the mobile frontend)? Is a proof of concept possible without memory/cookies? What do you think? --Atlasowa (talk) 12:53, 20 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Wow! I just saw this after your talk page post and a very impressed by it all. Thanks for all the great feedback!
 * I absolutely believe that the devs could "add a memory" to the feature. I went without a memory because I expected it to be far less controversial.  But there's no reason people couldn't do precisely what you suggest.
 * Preserving the Image's whitespace is very important to me-- people need to know what they're missing.  It's also very important to me that reveal be absolutely instant-- if there's network involved, people will be less inclined to reveal.
 * I know it would be fairly trivial to "save" session for any username users, and I don't see any technical reason we couldn't achieve that functionality for ip users.
 * I'm trying to take "babysteps" with this, as it were-- making a feature that doesn't change the status quo (since client side image hiding is already possible for techies). Adding memory might be a tiny bit more controversial, but I'd support it.  --HectorMoffet (talk) 10:14, 23 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, memory would be more controversial and i don't suggest it. I would like to know the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and these are best discussed with tangible proposals. I don't know how the mobile frontend "disable images" functionality exactly works and whom to ask about it. I would suggest something similar to that, which disables images without prejudgment, without ado onwiki, without enabling censorship by third parties and censorware. That's why i opposed the image filter concept (with the german anti-censorship crowd).
 * Back to your proposal. I think you're not very clear on what you are proposing:
 * 1) A user script? (Done)
 * 2) A gadget for user preferences? (Would not be available for IPs... but why not)
 * 3) Implementing your script in List Mode in MediaWiki:Common.js? (Who would decide which articles belong on this List of "controversial articles"? What about NOTCENSORED? terrible idea!)
 * 4) Implementing your script in Global Mode in MediaWiki:Common.js? (putting a headnote in every article box? Seriously?)
 * I think this should be clarified before putting this to a vote (both Requests for comment/Muhammad images and Village pump (proposals)). --Atlasowa (talk) 16:43, 23 March 2012 (UTC)