Board Thread:New Features/@comment-5275700-20161109233932/@comment-24473195-20161110092800

"Community members who have been around for a while will be pleased to hear that admins once again can manage the description and representative image for their wikis."

While this update is definitely useful, it would perhaps be better if Wikia think outside the box, and instead of using this tool only for a single purpose expand it to more novel uses.

Choosing a representative image for an article

One common issue in ALL wikis is that users can't really select the image that represents a particular article, some users add half a dozen images to their infoboxes, and others add it as a standard thumbnail. This is problematic in many cases because the wiki selects a representative image based on some algorithm and may choose an entirely inappropriate image. Consider an article about Homer Simpson that would likely contain the image of his wife, the algorithm might pick the image of Homer's wife if Homer's one isn't a good enough quality or is obscured.

Adding a brief summary of the article

The above could also apply to the summary for each page.

Using the power of readers (crowdsourcing)

While most readers are passive, and couldn't give a damn about doing anything to help the wiki they are reading, they are a very useful resource to facilitate the choice of an image for an article. While one random reader may pick a non-representative image, if this is applied to hundreds or tens of thousands, then chances are that they will eventually settle on a good choice for the article. For summaries, one could use a shortened version of the lede, and verify if readers believe this is a good summary. <

To avoid spam and bad suggestions, the algorithm could ask readers for key words that define an article, and editors can then use these to improve the description.

With mobile devices, such small tweaks are cheap and easy for people to make.

See also: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Editing_descriptions_from_Wikipedia_Android_app

This would open up a lot of possibilities, like Special:PageImages where the images of all articles can be seen. Or potentially the ability to have a magic word that will be automatically replaced with the representative image in things such as templates and portable infoboxes. It would also make it easier to quickly choose images for all articles, and also review them.