User:Colin/ShortestSide

• Featured Picture Shortest Sides
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The above slide show demonstrates how the population of photographs at FP has changed over the years. The x-axis is the length of the shortest side. The y-axis is scaled to 100 for the most popular bar. The red line shows the 5th percentile. The grey bars are for images with shortest side less than 2000 px. If you wrap-around the slideshow to flip between 2007 and 2017, the difference is dramatic.

In 2006 the Featured Picture criteria specified that images should be at least 2 megapixels. Your television used a cathode ray tube but you wanted a flat screen. The resolution of your television was 720 × 525 (0.38 MP). High definition TV, at 1920 × 1080 (2.1 MP) was a few years away yet. Today your television uses an LCD and if you bought one recently it will be 4K, at 3840 × 2160 (8.3 MP). This is about 4 times the linear resolution of standard definition. There are a few sizes of desktop and laptop display resolutions, and the market is led by 4K models. A 2 MP image will only occupy one quarter of the display on a 4K display and is only good to print a small 15 × 10 cm photo.

If we choose a higher threshold, there are two options of measurement. One is to use megapixels as before, and another to use the length of the shortest side. While megapixels are easy to understand, they don't scale linearly, and the file description page does not display MP as standard (though there is a script for that). Linear resolution is a better measure of how much an image can be magnified before it degrades, and the shortest side is the limiting factor. That value is also easy to discover from the file description page. English Wikipedia Featured Pictures set a minimum of 1500 px on the shorter side six years ago in 2012.

A 3:2 ratio six megapixel image has a shortest side of 2000 px. For five megapixels, the value is 1826, which we could round down to 1800. A threshold of 2000 px on the shortest side would affect only 4.5% of last years images, and likely fewer still in 2018. A threshold of 1800 px affects only 2.1% of last years images. Most, but not all, of these images have been downsized-for-the-web. Some come from Wiki Loves Earth, which didn't ask for high resolution, and some come from external sites where downsizing is routine.

The Commons FP rule says "Images (with the exception of animations, videos, and SVGs) of lower resolution than 2 million pixels (pixels, not bytes) are typically rejected unless there are strong mitigating reasons". The allowance to break the threshold for some images/circumstances can be retained, and argued for by the nominator.

I think choosing an 1800 px or 2000 px threshold on the shortest side would be a modest improvement on our current 12-year-old standard. A landscape image with shortest side 2160 will vertically fill a 4K display, so even a 2000 px threshold is not quite state-of-the-art for displays. An increased threshold will hopefully encourage less downsizing, and less discussion per-image about what is an acceptable bare minimum. It does not, of course, prevent any reviewer objecting about image sizes that exceed this, since even this threshold often represents a considerable downsize or crop. -- Colin (talk) 18:45, 9 May 2018 (UTC)