The Wikipedia app on iOS often crops lead images to the top third, showing only people's hair line.
I thought this bug was fixed ten years years ago, but I noticed the bug again in a recent unrelated WMF slidedeck, which prompted me to install the app and have a fresh look. I couldn't find an open task about it, hence filing a new one.
As I'm looking at it today, the issue appears worse than I remember. I forgot that we don't just add a banner on top, but also remove the photo from the default view of the article. So a person opening an article and reading the first few paragraphs and scrolling down, will never see the photo. (After I went looking for it, it wasn't obvious to me that the banner is clickable, and once I tried that, it seemed unreliable and required multiple taps to respond. Perhaps the click target clashes with something else. Or is the visual transition is blocked behind a web request?)
Cultural significance
This bug does not merely move focus or shift attention to the top, it omits the majority of the photo and thus completely misses the sentiment that a photo is meant to convey to the reader. Consider the Queen of Shiba and Prince Eugene paintings and how much cultural context is lost.
The Mona Lisa does not appear on the Mona Lisa article in the iOS app. The face of the subject does, but the painting is not there.
The Night Watch by Rembrandt is missing the young girl with the chicken and militiaman figure in white, that make the painting famous for its use of light and shadow.
I know these are technical issues, but from an end-user perspective this is editorial control and interference. The app is redefining what art looks like, redefining what people are known for and how they express themselves, and overriding editors who curate and carefully choose photos to convey information and context to readers.
These aren't tiny thumbnails in an array of search results in the middle of a larger workflow, or secondary photos further down the article. This is the lead photo, on top of the one article the reader has chosen to open and learn more about. And in the moment where we are expected to present them the best we have on a chosen subject, we present this:
Current result
The examples are from using the app for five minutes after a fresh install on an iPhone, searching for common first names/titles (Alice, Charles, Irene, Patricia, Queen, Prince, etc) and selecting a high-ranking article from the search suggestions:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_van_Dyk
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Cooper
- https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATRICIA
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Montesquieu
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Sheba
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Eugene_of_Savoy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Watch
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_Costa_Lima
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brady
Real photos
As shown on desktop web, mobile web, and Android.
Other information
Related tasks:
- T93829: Cut off leading images
- T104480: Refactor face detection to be done on-demand
- T131424: WikidataPageBanner when using page images generated API renders badly cropped images
- T148926: [BUG] Face detection failing in many articles on iOS app (works on same articles in Android and mobile web)
- T156217: Lead image should not crop to face detection if less than 5% of the entire picture
- T214718: The iPhone Wikipedia app has bizarre and redundant lead image rendering rules that breaks readability for many articles
- T229534: iOS13 [Feature] - Look into new image saliency API for better cropping