The iphone wikipedia app renders the lead image of articles at the top forcibly cropped to about 1 height : 1.5 width. The app then shows the exact same image again after the first paragraph without cropping, including all caption text.

Lead image rendering choices are made differently for smartphone browser rendering, which simply places the image in flow with where it is actually placed in the article. So if the lead image is at the top, it is shown in full at the top of the article

There is no reason for the app and browser teams to choose two entirely different standards for where to place the lead image and how to crop it. The arbitrary differences between the two introduce serious rendering bugs into many articles. Since the browser is used more than the app, most articles are tailored to it, at the expense of the experience in the app.

The result is that the app experience is terrible, including these defects:

• Many lead images look like a bad bug when cropped to an arbitrary aspect ratio, such as graphs where the axis labels get trimmed off.
• The readability of many articles is busted since the second paragraph is arbitrarily broken away from the first paragraph. Often the caption text for the image is redundant with the lead article or very lengthy. The whole article becomes unreadable this way.
• Seeing an image twice in a row separated by 1 paragraph looks like a bug to end users.
• Worst of all, authors of articles have these two competing standards to deal with, both produced by the wikipedia team! The more arbitrarily different design choices are made like this, the worse the quality of articles overall. It's like wikipedia developers are choosing to fragment their own platform for no reason at all.

To resolve these issues, the app team should be following the lead of the browser team when it comes to placing and cropping lead images.