This is a featured picture on English Wikipedia. But you can't see it because the Wikimedia Foundation software has a problem. The problem is a longstanding one because it's been replaced at the article about sumo wrestling with a non-featured image. And that neglect does not demonstrate respect for the volunteer Victor Rocha who did the restoration work.In order to see this featured picture, it's necessary to go to the hosting page and click on the link where the thumbnail ought to be. So I did a check on how many people are actually viewing this page. Turns out that for the month of January 2009, the hosting page at English Wikipedia received only 50 page views, and the corresponding hosting page at Wikimedia Commons received only 56 views. So at most--if every one of those views represents a a unique hit and every one of those visitors clicked through to the full version--106 people set eyes on one of the site's best images. And we can be pretty darn sure the actual number was lower.
It's time to prioritize the proper display of images. I'm not certain what bug caused the sumo failure, since it's a JPEG image and JPEGs normally display, but WMF software consistently fails to display PNG images larger than 12.5 MB. What you get instead is this at right, which ought to look like an eighteenth century engraving of American Revolutionary War sea captain John Paul Jones. He cuts a dashing figure topside on the deck of a warship in battle--or he would if you could see him. Since WMF software doesn't accept TIFF files, we're stuck with PNGs if we want to upload uncompressed formats. This is a serious detriment to utility and to collaborative editing, and editors who live in parts of the world that have slow Internet access are effectively shut off by this bug.These problems inhibit the use and creation of featured content.
For shame.
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