During the discussions surrounding controversial content, there has been a(n uncontroversial) suggestion that MediaWiki / Wikimedia wikis should have a functionality where no images (in the content area) are loaded when the rest of the page loads and are instead replaced with placeholder images. When the placeholder is clicked, the image being click would be loaded asynchronously.

This functionality has a variety of uses:

• "safer" browsing in environments where you may be confronted with surprising images (at work, during presentations, etc.)
• much, much faster load times on mobile devices or even on desktop devices

It should be fairly easy to implement this with JavaScript/jQuery, I think? It might need some server-side support as well. I think there's a fairly strong case for putting this into MediaWiki core, but I'd settle for an extension.

Toggling the image switch could be done via user preference or via a link in the toolbox.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34023

Note

We have this in MobileFrontend for older browsers in our lazy loading code, however the goal is different.
Here the goal seems to be around protecting users.
I have opinions around that, but trying to provide a technical pov here.