The Signpost

Technology report

Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia

Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery> markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.

Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery> to <gallery mode=packed> produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.

In addition, the heights parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px> gives


Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.

Packed-hover (move your mouse over the images below)
Packed-overlay

It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.

VisualEditor enhancements

In brief

This video (the 1911 film Little Nemo) will expand out when you click on it, for easy viewing.

















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