When you enter any given date of the year into Wikipedia, you are taken to a page that describes the significant events on that day of the year, together with the births and deaths of significant people who were either born or died on that day.
In the births or deaths section, you can hover over the name of any given person, and their picture will often pop up. Wikipedia grabs this picture (if there is one) from the link to that person’s page on Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, the picture that ends up popping up is somewhat random, and therefore less than informative. It might be that person at the height of their fame, or as a child, or at an advanced age.
And yet, there are thousands of images on the Web of most significant people. Many of those images are tagged either by year or by age of the subject.
Given that, I would like to see the following enhancement to Wikipedia’s pop-up feature: When you hover over a person’s name, you should see a scrollable gallery.
As you scroll left, the person gets younger. As you scroll right, they get older. Rather than accepting a single arbitrary representation of the life of a significant person, you can choose which aspect of that person’s life you are looking for.
I wonder whether that would be difficult to implement.
I suspect the main difficulty would be of a legal nature rather than technical. How many of those images would be available with appropriate copyright permissions?