Last modified: 2014-07-08 10:03:56 UTC
Created attachment 15854 [details] Side-by-side comparison of plain category and the way it is on Commons with javascript The Wikimedia Commons community has developed a gadget to override the trimming of file names to ~ 22 characters (followed by ellipsis) and instead display the full file name. For over a year now this gadget has been enabled by default. We should work with the designers and the community to make a collective decision that makes sense for everyone and settle on something. I don't think this is the kind of thing where it makes sense for an individual wiki to have reasons to do it differently, we ought to be able to figure out what's best for everyone here.
I imagine this will be an easier conversation to have when filenames aren't the primary mechanism for explaining what the picture is - see our other work on Wikibase/Commons. Eventually that work will enable us to have a file browser that doesn't rely on seeing the entire file title. Once that work is further down the road, I would start the conversation with the gadget authors, and Commons at large, as to whether they still need the increased space.
This is a config setting. Ive long thought it should be changed on commons. Last time i suggested it people were kind of negative for some reason. I strongly support disabling the trimming of commons file names
$wgGalleryOptions['captionLength'] = 255; would be the setting change needed to disable this "feature". Even if not totally disabled. In the context of commons it should probably be set much higher. Probably at least 60.