WebP experiment in Wikipedia
Mathias Schindler
a friend of mine has written a small gadget for Wikipedia (the English
language edition only right now) that replaces JPEG thumbnails in
Wikipedia articles with a WebP image. It is not meant as a way to save
bandwidth as the JPEG thumbnail will continue to be loaded. By moving
your mouse over the image and back, you can compare the differences in
WebP and JPEG compression.
In order to join the experiment, you need to be registered in
Wikipedia. Log in with your user account and visit your user custom
javascript file. It is assumed that you are using the Vector skin for
Wikipedia, which is the default skin. You can reach the custom
javascript file via
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/vector.js
add the following line to your custom javascript file:
importScript('User:Magnus Manske/webp.js');
This line imports the content of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/webp.js
You might have to reload your Wikipedia page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bypass_your_cache) to make the
change visible.
On average, the WebP image should be much smaller than the JPEG
thumbnail with similar or equal quality. Not much tweaking was done.
Again, this is an experiment only for people with a bit of prior
knowledge of Wikipedia, it is not designed to become a mainstream tool
to use WebP images in Wikipedia. However, if anyone is interested in
that, it would be great to pick up Bug 25611 from Mediawiki's
Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25611
Mathias