[WikiEN-l] Why linking an image gives less choice to the reader

Ray Saintonge said: I tried to explain earlier. Here it is again in detail. By the way, in case you're wondering, my phobia is real. This is a fictional example, but my extreme reaction to pictures of certain bugs is very real. Suppose I know that there is a web page out there in entomology-land that contains several pictures, many of which I'm pretty sure will give me waking hallucinations. Other pictures on the web page, well I'm very keen to look at them. It seems that the site owners have wisely interspersed the text of the page with inline images, they're all in the appropriate place in the page and they all have appropriate filenames, alt tags or captions. So it's a doddle, I just go to the website and read it like normal. If I see a picture caption that looks interesting, I use the right button menu to make it appear in the page--which takes a second or so for most pictures. If a caption suggests an image that may cause me to have a terrifying hallucination, I don't click it. Now suppose we caterpillarphobes all ganged up and said it wasn't right showing pictures of caterpillars on bug websites, and we convinced them that this was very distressing and shouldn't be ignored. Maybe they'd react by linking those images. That would suck because it wouldn't make things any better for me (I'm already quite happy because I know which pictures I want to see in the article and I select them). But everybody who didn't mind looking at ugly bugs (and I'm told there are quite a few!) would no longer have the option of making their own mind up whether to see the caterpillars alongside the text that they illustrate. Inline an image on Wikipedia, and you give the reader three choices: He can look at the image as you intended it to be seen, in the article. He can look at the article without the image. He can look at the image without the article. Link the image and you leave him with only two of those choices. The most valuable of those choices--which should probably be the default for all readers who do not have a serious reaction to the image, is removed. There is no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Once you displace an inlined image to a link, the text and the illustration are divorced. All you have done is to take away from the run-of-the-mill reader the opportunity to see the text and the illustration together, so he can read the description and look at the corresponding picture.