Last modified: 2012-12-17 17:03:54 UTC
Seriously. It's been, like, a decade. How can Wikipedia still not be able to support the most popular form of lossless file, several years after knowing it's an issue. This is simply gross incompetence, that actively encourages people to use lossy file types that do work, instead of lossless ones that are archival quality. Commons has been actively harmed by inaction on this.
Hi Adam, please provide a concrete example for this. Also, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug describes how to provide good descriptions in bug reports. Saying that somebody is incompetent likely will not help you convince people of your case.
[[:File:Gustave_Doré_-_Dante_Alighieri_-_Inferno_-_Plate_9_(Canto_III_-_Charon).png]] [[:File:W.E.F._Britten_-_The_Early_Poems_of_Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson_-_Oenone.png]] [[:File:Gavin_Hamilton_-_Coriolanus_Act_V,_Scene_III.png]] [[:File:Louis_Huard_-_The_Punishment_of_Loki.png]] [[:File:Ulysses_S._Grant_from_West_Point_to_Appomattox.png]] That's a small smattering of the Featured Pictures I had to upload twice, once as a lossy JPEG, once as a lossless PNG. It's actually considered a requirement by some at English Featured Picture Candidates that the PNG of a restoration be uploaded alongside the JPEG that Wikipedia actually allows users to use. See, for example: [[:en:Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/The_Early_Poems_of_Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson]] "PNG versions, could you upload PNG versions for a lossless version if someone else wants to use or edit them? Are the original versions uploaded too?" PNG versions are also largely necessary for printing. I mean, I suppose someone could use TIFF, but TIFF files tend to be at least twice the size of PNG files, and thus can easily hit the upload limit. And if you can't upload it, it can't be used at all. It honestly baffles me that Wikipedia actually paid someone to provide rudimentary TIFF support, but still cannot support PNGs with any reliability. This is even before you get to the problem with https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18014 where PNGs almost invariably look worse than JPEGs once thumbnailed, because the test was evidently done on simple bar graphs or something (which are also done in JPEG) and do not actually reflect how either JPEG or PNG is used on Wikipedia. In short, I rather despair for the ability of Wikimedia to actually handle the image side of the project, as the decisions made rarely seem to reflect reality.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 9497 ***