Agreed I have most of my experience in book design mostly history of book design pre Gutenbergian period and do consider myself only vaguely familiar with web design But I understand that through history images have posed a problem to book designer If images exist there on the page in their own right and the page is as much an image as a carrier of the text the layout can be and usually is creative But in such towards written information and legibility orientated enterprises as wikipedia this is not a sensible approach Furthermore the images are only thumbs pointers and only full size image gives the full impression So I see no particular reason for playing around with incomplete images what serve only as reference marks