Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-1845439-20160110001641/@comment-11733175-20160110112513

SVG isn't inherently secure as a format, so they're often rendered as PNG instead (or they are on Wikia anyway) as users can upload any file they want which could execute something malicious against other unsuspecting users. It's something that's built into MediaWiki, so there's no simple way around it.

The behaviour you're looking for is found on normal sites, which embed the SVG into the HTML. On MediaWiki, you can embed the SVG into the HTML using JavaScript, although you'll need to submit it for review so Wikia staff can makes sure there's nothing malicious in it. I'm not 100% sure how you'd get the raw SVG, but you could potentially download it from Wikimedia Commons and then copy the source into JS?