Our handling of embedded YouTube videos in articles has annoyed me for a while -- consider, for instance, the video section of the Cataclysm article: for me, it shows up as about four pages of click-to-Flash placeholders. To some extent, the problem is addressed in the external links policy, which requires that (most) articles contain at most two <youtube> tags, but enforcement seems problematic (are we really going to remove that list of Cataclysm videos from the expansion's own page?), and the requirement itself slightly arbitrary. There are also a couple of minor annoyances with the <youtube> tag: the player itself is rather small (and often of the wrong aspect ratio), and does not allow you to video the video in full-screen mode.
To address these things, I'd like to introduce the VideoLink extension, which allows you to specify where a video player should appear in the article, and create multiple links that would open different videos in that same player. You can see how this works on the Cataclysm article: rather than the pages of video embeds, the video section is now a (short) list of links, that, once clicked, will open the video in a player at the top of the section. It is my hope that this approach will significantly reduce the bulkiness of video sections in all our articles (perhaps allowing us to include more videos where appropriate), and make watching videos on Wowpedia a more enjoyable experience.
As an additional bonus, you can also customize the size of the player, link to specific times in the video, and create multiple players on one page; see Help:VideoLink for the syntax of the tag and parser function introduced by the extension, as well as another example of it in action.
The extension is currently enabled on the wiki, so feel free to grab a Sandbox and try out the syntax for yourself. As always, your feedback on both the general approach to the problem and the specific implementation is welcome in this thread. If it turns out that the extension both works and is acceptable, we can eventually start replacing <youtube> in additional articles.
— foxlit (talk) 19:51, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
