After a successful Google Summer of Code, Sumit (@codezee) on irc with
help from Nicolas Raoul of the Wikivoyage editing community and
myself, I am excited to announce that Wikivoyage is now using the
WikidataPageBanner extension [1].

A bit of back story - the Wwikivoyage community built a template so
articles could display banners to increase engagement with their
content. The implementation had a few problems - for instance,
templates do not allow you to ship different styles for smaller
devices or use media queries, nor do they allow you to serve different
images to different browsers. As a result not only did banners not
render well on mobile but they also would result in a large image
download for a reader.

New features include a drop down table of contents, responsive images
and better mobile support. For the purposes of mobile, we have
introduced a focus parameter called `origin` which allows editors to
define which part of the banner shows on a smaller screen.

To take an example https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Seattle before and
after pictures of applying the parameter [2] and getting banners to
focus on the space needle:
http://imgur.com/iA1N1RC,K3EvpDi

I'm hoping we can write API's and tools to make this easier for
editors to use and I'm hoping other wikis might adopt this interesting
feature (they are very cool for user pages [3]!! :)).

There's still room for improvement. The banners on mobile can be made
even better, I think, and there has been little design input for the
mobile site so far. There are also issues with srcset support on older
browers, and hard problems to think about. Tasks are open for tracking
this work so please dive in [4].

I welcome any new contributors to help polish it even further by
working on one of those tasks or contributing new tasks. I'll be at
hand to help with code review.

If you have any questions please fire them away and please join me in
congratulating Sumit on his first major contribution to our movement
and building the first mediawiki extension to launch first on
Wikivoyage :-).

Thanks to everyone who has helped advise, review the extension for
deployment and provided input/discussions on Wikivoyage travellers pub
and phabricator.

~ Jon
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikidataPageBanner
[2] https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/2846318
[3] https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikidata-page-banner/board/

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