17 ms·

Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia

• johnchristopher 8y ago
  I remember seeing those preview for weeks (months) but the article publication date is 20th of April. It's pretty cool :).
  • mavidser 8y ago
    I too was surprised by the date, given that I've been using it for the past year, at least, or more. Apparently, it went into beta in 2014[1]. [1]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-available-as-a-beta-feature-on-all-wikimedia-wikis/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-availab...
• kabes 8y ago
  Or they could have started with an MVP without thumbnails and html and improved it over time, would have been more valuable then having no preview at all.
  • SiempreViernes 8y ago
    They do say they needed html to provide even a non-broken preview, and I expect the text summary was the most tricky thing to do in any case, just guessing a good picture can't have been too hard. In any case, they had something 2 years ago but it was blocked by the community for not being good enough.
• JorgeGT 8y ago
  TL;DR: they had to choose a thumbnail and summary. I have been using WikiWand for years, which not only did that but also makes reading Wikipedia much better. Maybe I'm the only one but I have the hardest time reading paragraphs with lots of words per line. Previously I had to resize the browser each time I had to read something in Wikipedia :|
  • DeGi 8y ago
    Thanks for letting me know about WikiWand.
  • jaysonelliot 8y ago
    Came here to say the same thing about Wikiwand. I've been using it about a year now, and it has radically improved my experience reading Wikipedia. As you point out, it's had a smoothly working link preview feature all along, as well as a beautiful, usable reading experience. Not flashy or over-designed, just clean and elegant. I get a little caught off-guard now when I see a Wikipedia page without it.
  • fenwick67 8y ago
    Yup, I have a user stylesheet that limits wikipedia's article width for this reason
• cantrevealname 8y ago
  One downside is that when I move the cursor along while reading an article all sorts of links now pop up at me. What I mean is using the mouse or trackpad to keep my place in the article; sometimes I drag the cursor to highlight the text, especially when skimming. Surely I'm not the only one who does this?
  • throwawayReply 8y ago
    You're very much not alone, this comes up frequently here at hn, because other sites also frustratingly block this behaviour often by popping up "tweet this" links after highlighting.
  • thinkingemote 8y ago
    At the bottom of every popup there is a cog icon. Clicking the cog icon gives a popup where you can choose to Disable and Enable the feature.
    • vermontdevil 8y ago
      Thanks. I’ll do that!
  • stedaniels 8y ago
    There should really be some "hover intent" going on if there isn't already and it just needs tweaking maybe?
    • ckoerner 8y ago
      IIRC the delay value is set at 500ms before a preview is shown.
      • dc3k 8y ago
        It seems like the timer starts as soon as the pointer enters the link area. I would be happier if it was 250ms that starts when the pointer stops moving. Either way I love this feature.
• vanillaboy 8y ago
  Can I access this API externally, e.g. by sending a http get request to some endpoint, to get the summary content in JSON format?
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    You can get a similar effect by hitting Wikipedia for its extract. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&format=json&exintro=&titles=wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extract...
  • Findus23 8y ago
    Yes you can, there is a nice API returning the Popup-data in JSON https://stackoverflow.com/a/48527419/4398037 https://stackoverflow.com/a/48527419/4398037 Documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Page_content/get_page_summary_title https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Page_content/get_pag...
• majewsky 8y ago
  > People seem to like it — we are seeing 5,000 hits to our API a minute to serve those cards that show when you hover over any link. Uhm, no. It just means that people are hovering over links with their mouse. It does not imply any opinion about the previews. > The original idea was conceived four years ago When I was active at Wikipedia/Wikibooks 12 years ago, there was a user script floating around that did the same thing, except I'm not sure if it included an image. (Mediawiki allows a user to define custom CSS and JS that get embedded in every page of their user session.) I don't mean to express dislike or downplay the hard work that went into this feature, just to add some context.
  • panic 8y ago
    > Uhm, no. It just means that people are hovering over links with their mouse. It does not imply any opinion about the previews. When you evaluate features using engagement metrics, there are only two possibilities. If the metric is high, users love the feature. If the metric is low, users don't know the feature exists, and more alerts or "unread" badges must be added to help them learn.
    • majewsky 8y ago
      My point is that the metric is bad.
    • mappu 8y ago
      Alternatively, if it's a feature you don't like: If the metric is high, users are spending too much time on it. Also, it is responsible for every single frustration that users have with your product. If the metric is low, the feature can be safely removed (see: Windows Start menu).
      • megaman22 8y ago
        > If the metric is low, the feature can be safely removed (see: Windows Start menu). That turned out really well... Whoever is responsible for putting the touch start screen on Windows Server is responsible for 90% of my frustrations...
• shakna 8y ago
  I am continually impressed by the markup Wikipedia generates. They've managed to pull in pretty link previews, scientific notation and a grid layout, whilst building a highly nested markup structure? The remarkable part? Wikipedia works great inside a text browser like elinks. It works great in a modern browser. Without sacrificing the interactivity people have grown to expect.
  • xab9 8y ago
    Last time I checked, their markup was pretty much nightmare fuel, but it should work fine with IE5, I'm sure :)
    • baud147258 8y ago
      It works well for the latest (and last) version of IE, at least.
      • xab9 8y ago
        Using IE11 with the emulator switched to IE5 I can assure you, it works in IE5. At least the main layout, no popup though :D Still equal parts scary and astonishing.
        • seba_dos1 8y ago
          Wikipedia is a content-heavy website first, webapp only second. If it's written correctly, then of course it's going to work in IE5 - maybe with some parts of the layout looking ugly, maybe with some margins being wrong, some media not being embedded, but generally should be usable. Nowadays it's fine for a webdev to not test their pages on IE5, but when the page is done right, there is no reason for it not to work in IE5, lynx, w3m or Netscape Navigator. Really, it's just a webdeveloper's job done right.
          • xab9 8y ago
            Nope, it's not "done right". It's a table layout from the nineties. But probably there's an api so noone would have to scrape a wiki page, I never needed to do that fortunately :)
• fapjacks 8y ago
  That preview window has been a lifesaver. Honestly, as someone with ADD (or ADHD or whatever it's called these days), Wikipedia is a fucking minefield. I regularly have many Wikipedia articles open in sometimes ten or twenty different windows, each with anywhere from twenty to fifty tabs (I open a new window to delineate a completely new tangent, or if opening a new tab will cause the tab icons to disappear, otherwise I open a new tab in the current window -- I like tabs and make heavy use of Session Buddy and The Great Suspender). The preview window has really cut a lot of the extraneous BS out of my evening-destroying rabbit holes. I figured it was probably a difficult thing to develop, but if anyone involved with its creation passes by this lowly post, please know that you have my sincerest gratitude for making such a meaningful, useful tool.
  • azeirah 8y ago
    Wikipedia's a minefield for people with ADD, yep. But oddly enough, I found that Stackoverflow's "hot questions" or whatever thing is equally distracting. I'm on a professional software developer network, and then I see a super interesting and legitimate question aaaaaannnddd... I'm in a rabbithole. Don't know if it's helpful or not for you, but I found an extension that limits the maximum amount of tabs you can have open at a given moment, I set it to 3-4, it forces me to decide what link I do or do not want to click on. Makes me conscious of my unconscious browsing habits, might be useful for you too: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/max-tabs-web-ext/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/max-tabs-web-...
    • fapjacks 8y ago
      Oh, yes, SO's hot network questions is a hardcore distraction for me, too. Even for things I really don't care about! Like all those workplace drama questions (do so many people really think going to HR is going to do them any good at all?). The extension you linked is a very interesting concept, something I hadn't thought about using before. But I like the idea of paying a little bit of thought up front to help keep things from exploding down the line. Thanks!
      • 8y ago
• _delirium 8y ago
  I had no idea what this was talking about, and it appears to be because they've defaulted it to off for existing logged-in users. Maybe that's a way of reducing pushback. In case you want to turn it on (or off), it's under Preferences->Appearance->Page previews. I think I'll probably leave it off personally. I like the previews that have already existed for a while in the mobile app, but on desktop not so sure.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    > they've defaulted it to off for existing logged-in users I see these even when logged out.
    • _delirium 8y ago
      That's what I meant, the previews are on by default for not-logged-in users, but appear to be off by default for logged-in users (or at least the preference was set to 'off' for me).
      • saagarjha 8y ago
        I'm seeing them in both cases.
        • ckoerner 8y ago
          Perhaps you had enabled the beta feature and when the feature went to production the setting was kept enabled? Check under Preferences>Appearance>"Reading preferences".
          • saagarjha 8y ago
            Hmm, that could be it, since it's showing up as enabled for me. I have "Automatically enable all new beta features" on, so I guess I was just betaing this feature for a long time.
    • blauditore 8y ago
• rurban 8y ago
  As the major other php wiki implementor, phpwiki, I can add my input to this. I've implemented such an ajax page preview and also a page inliner (for expanding page trees via ajax) about 10 years ago. It was major work, because you essentially send a stripped down page in xml, so it needed some architectural changes to separate the various page templates properly. In the end it needed 2 months work. phpwiki has a proper template design and its plugins cannot ever destroy a page layout or harm security. mediawiki on the other side is horribly undesigned spaghetti code, with no proper templating and plugin integration, so it needed a few years more. It's like parsing html with regexp.
  • ckoerner 8y ago
    > mediawiki on the other side is horribly undesigned spaghetti code But like my mom's spaghetti, it's my favorite. :) Think you can make it better? https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, but this subtle snark is my own, and may not reflect the views of the Foundation.
• xab9 8y ago
  This thing is not exactly customizable. I couldn't care less for the huge image in the popup layer, scrollability and extra content would be much nicer.
  • TuringTest 8y ago
    You can switch to the classic Navigation popups gadget,[1] which has a lot more configuration options (including links that shows the history or whole article text in the popup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_pop...
• sdoering 8y ago
  Wow. Had just read that and then saw the feature first time while browsing over a list page. Was moving my curser down the list and when ever I wanted to click a link, the above link hat popped up the layer, highjacking my click and leading me to the wrong page. What a great way of destroying the user experience with a beautifully over-engineered feature that is utterly crap while actually trying to use the underlying page. Thanks an awful lot for breaking the ability to use the site as I am used to and making it impossible to scan with the curser as anchor for my eyes.
  • mackwerk 8y ago
    At least you seem to be able to disable them, click the cog in the corner of the card :)
  • vbezhenar 8y ago
    I have a habit to select some text in a page when I'm reading it. And I hate websites that trying to immediately interact with me when I'm selecting a text (usually it's "fix a typo" or something similar).
    • baud147258 8y ago
      Same here. I hate even more website where you can't select the text.
    • contoraria 8y ago
      Hate is a pretty strong word and kind of irrational. Textselection was probably not intended as reading aid, so don't be disappointed if it is abused to actually, you know, select text to do something with it. I agree, user scripts can be presumptuous and what not. I used to read with text selection the same way, and even reacted repulsed at advertisement hover pop-ups. But somehow I don't do it anymore, so I don't care as much.
  • KenanSulayman 8y ago
    "a [...] over-engineered feature that is utterly crap" I'm not usually trying to police this kind of thing, but is there a way you could have phrased this without discrediting the work of a lot of people whose goal is to help others? I'm sure you'd get both a little bit hurt inside and defensive when someone in your team calls your code "utterly crap." That said, I'm very sure they will be happy to hear about your feedback.
• saagarjha 8y ago
  I think I have these turned off, since in Safari I can Force Touch on links to preview them in a similar fashion. This has the benefit of letting me choose where I want to stop reading, instead of cutting a sentence off at some arbitrary point.
  • always_good 8y ago
    You have to manually highlight phrases, even if it's already hyperlinked together, to force-click them. So I end up never using it. Wikipedia's is simple. And you can just disable it. Win/win.
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      > You have to manually highlight phrases, even if it's already hyperlinked together, to force-click them Huh, that's not the behavior I see with Force Touch. Hyperlinks automatically come together, and there's some sort of heuristic for detecting word clusters such as names or places.
• Numberwang 8y ago
  I personally always use the mobile version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for desktop these days. I much prefer it to the standard version.
  • simias 8y ago
    I hate that I don't have the bar on the left to be able to switch to a different language conveniently. I use it all the time and I've no idea if it's even accessible at all in the mobile version. The mobile version also wastes a ton of screen real-estate but I guess that's fashionable these days. I really enjoy Wikipedia but the #1 item on my feature wishlist is "redirect me towards the non-mobile version of the site when I click a mobile link on the desktop".
    • rory096 8y ago
      It's at the top of each page - click the icon directly under the article title (on the left) that looks like a Chinese character next to an A. I'd snip a screenshot, but I'm on mobile...
      • giancarlostoro 8y ago
        > I'd snip a screenshot, but I'm on mobile... If you've got a smart phone chances are you can probably take a screenshot, only hassle then is uploading it somewhere.
        • rory096 8y ago
          Yeah I know, I just didn't feel like going through all that while lying in bed at 4am. In any case I was thinking a cropped one would be better (hence the 'snip') — so here it is in all its desktop-edited glory: https://i.imgur.com/XQKiEIp.png https://i.imgur.com/XQKiEIp.png
      • simias 8y ago
        Oh! I had never paid attention to this icon. This is going to be useful in the future I'm sure, thank you.
• second_sytem 8y ago
  I hate those previews. It is much faster and less distracting to actually follow a link and do some speed reading.
• Findus23 8y ago
  If you want to integrate this into your project: There is a nice API returning the JSON data of the popup https://stackoverflow.com/a/48527419/4398037 https://stackoverflow.com/a/48527419/4398037 Documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Page_content/get_page_summary_title https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/#!/Page_content/get_pag...
• jopsen 8y ago
  > We couldn’t expect every single article to be edited to designate a thumbnail. It wouldn't surprise me if they could. Not to say that automation isn't great, and for this purpose probably ideal. But, selecting a thumbnail for every Wikipedia article seems like something the community could easily have done.
  • anc84 8y ago
    And what a completely senseless thing it would be. Reminds me of all the random stockphotos in articles wasting bandwidth and attention for no gain.
• matthewfelgate 8y ago
  I love the preview hovers, a Great way to quickly take in additional information.
• anilgulecha 8y ago
  This is useful feature, but do note for some class of wikipedia surfing this is a net-negative: For the case when I came across a subject I knew not a lot about I would keep queuing them up, leading to an array of pages I'd read about a topic, leading to a deeper understanding about the topic/domain. With this feature, the probability that a page would be queued up would go down. Sometimes going down the wiki rabbit-hole is the best form of time-sink.
• omegote 8y ago
  Not to mention another probable reason: Mediawiki's codebase is a mess and should be rebuilt from the ground up, if possible not in PHP. I once had to build an extension for it and it still gives me the creeps.
  • lucideer 8y ago
    > if possible not in PHP I'm not a fan of PHP as a language, but given the community has been working with PHP for 16 years, it would be odd to switch suddenly to an entirely new language and expect support and adoption. The codebase is an absolute nightmare though, and a ground-up rebuild would be great. I wonder though about it having a similar affect to the Wordpress codebase: people who recognise the mess stay away completely, and people who don't contribute, leaving a contributor base who isn't really equipped (or extremely willing) to do a quality, maintainable rewrite. I suspect any rewrite attempt would be doomed to end up being an unmaintainable behemoth. A better approach would be to focus on secure integration tools and API entry-points, to make users less entrenched and solely dependent on the MW software.
• vermontdevil 8y ago
  I hate that preview feature. I always hover over links out of habit ready to click if I’m interested. But that pop up blocks me from reading the text.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• osrec 8y ago
  I know some people don't appreciate it, but I really liked the preview. I feel it lets you get the gist of ancillary topics so you can understand the main article better, without having to switch contexts completely.
• mschaef 8y ago
  The step ups in API usage over the last year are rather dramatic: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/reading-web-page-previews?orgId=1&panelId=2&fullscreen&from=1480245159889&to=1524481960401 https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/reading-web-page-...
  • jdlrobson 8y ago
    We're quite transparent about what we release and when - spikes can be easily attributed to events on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Release_timeline https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Release_timeline if you are interested in what caused them!
• Artemis2 8y ago
  Learned from this article that they make their Grafana dashboards public: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/file/varnish-http-errors.json?from=now-12h&to=now https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/file/varnish-http-er... The variety of metrics and the sheer volume of those is awesome to explore! (e.g. frequent peaks to 20M requests per minute)
  • ckoerner 8y ago
    We're very transparent (I work for the Wikimedia Foundation). You can see the specific dashboard for the Page Preview feature here (Last 6 hours): https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/eventlogging-schema-jumbo?orgId=1&var-datasource=eqiad%20prometheus%2Fops&var-schema=VirtualPageView&from=now-6h&to=now https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/eventlogging-sche...
• mezzode 8y ago
  I opted into the beta for this way back and have been using it for ages, it was pretty surprising finding out it only just went into wide release. Given how useful I found it I'd have thought it would have been released pretty quickly even when not perfect, but given the results can't complain. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-available-as-a-beta-feature-on-all-wikimedia-wikis/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/03/26/Hovercards-now-availab...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• phkahler 8y ago
  When we do finally send people to Mars I think they'll appreciate having a local copy of Wikipedia with them. This would be one of the top 10 resources beyond what's required to produce air, food, water, and heat. Otherwise, something comes up and any question you have could take almost an hour to get a response from someone on earth.
  • diggan 8y ago
    That's easy (much easier than to get to Mars): Download your dump from http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/ http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/ and extract it with https://github.com/dignifiedquire/zim https://github.com/dignifiedquire/zim Now you have a fully static Wikipedia copy, running wherever you want it to :)
  • contoraria 8y ago
    Wikipedia is, by my estimate, to 90% about animals, places, historic places, historic animals, historic people, "notable" living people, and so on. How's that going to be relevant on mars? And who's going to vet all the articles?
    • F_r_k 8y ago
      Maybe, but those 1% remaining (thousands of articles) about physics, engineering, and so on are a goldmine if you are stranded without anything else. It would be dumb no to take it as the complete dump is < 1Tb
• tombrossman 8y ago
  One of the best things about ad blockers is that they are really just general purpose content blockers. Want to disable this permanently? Here's an Adblock Plus-compatible filter to block the div if you find it annoying. Tested and working on uBlock Origin: ! Disable link preview popups on Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org##.mwe-popups It's just a div with the class ".mwe-popups", and using your ad blocker will persist the change after clearing cookies, which the preference setting (mentioned elsewhere here) does not. For Wikipedia in different languages, just change the subdomain in the filter.
  • username223 8y ago
    Thank you! I found those things incredibly annoying and useless, and was just about to dig through the source to figure out how to get rid of them.
  • thought_alarm 8y ago
    You can disable them by clicking the little gear icon on the pop up itself. I figured that out by googling aroung for half an hour. It's just wretched, backwards UI all around.
    • scrooched_moose 8y ago
      As OP stated, that's tied to your cookies though and won't be a "permanent" solution.
      • mertd 8y ago
        I would expect the setting to persist if you're logged in but that's probably not something people do on Wikipedia.
        • azernik 8y ago
          I do, but that's only because I edit every once in a while.
  • 8y ago
• joelcornett 8y ago
  I wrote this as one of my first HTML/JavaScript projects. It’s far from perfect, but it served me well for 4 years. It was not difficult to make and uses MediaWikis existing APIs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipreview/iioncmbmegjiadkijjkmockilogpplhg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipreview/iioncm...
• thelastidiot 8y ago
  Not to criticize the hard work that went into doing this feature (I worked on a project using wikipedia/wiktionary data), all the things that had to be achieved to come up with a "simple" preview features are just made hard because the data in wiki media is not machine friendly. Things like the obvious priority order of fields and bizarre templates that one needs to implement to parse the data makes the job unbelievably hard in the first place.
  • squeaky-clean 8y ago
    Yeah one of my first web scraping projects was using Wikipedia because I figured it would be easy to parse and have a fairly standard format, right? Well at least it was a good and sobering first lesson about cleaning data.
  • osteele 8y ago
    In UCG gardens — as with data structure and algorithm design — there are trade-offs among retrieval difficulty (friction, for humans; time complexity, for machines), update difficulty, centralization and skill set of contributors, and centralization and skill set of editors, and the complexity of the structures themselves. IMDB, CYC, Wolfram, and various RDF data sets, sample this space differently, and have different amounts of data and richness, probably as a result.
• nfoz 8y ago
  I dislike the "popup" UI metaphor, where some content obscures other content from view. I also dislike when passive action such as "hover" causes stuff to jump around the screen. I think these are distracting and confusing. It makes me cautious for where can I "rest" my mouse on the screen. I worry about the impact for accessibility-oriented users.
• abalone 8y ago
  Why so much effort on a feature that doesn’t and probably can’t work on mobile? Were they happy enough with Safari’s 3D Touch preview which does more or less exactly this? (Only with a full screen preview so they don’t have to get into the messy business of summarizing pages.)
  • buildawesome 8y ago
    I imagine it's because they see high readership on desktop browsers.
    • abalone 8y ago
      Just look at the traffic analysis. Mobile browsers have just about eclipsed desktop and they continue to grow.[1] Mobile support is table stakes for major features these days. [1] https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-os https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit...
  • always_good 8y ago
    I don't get it. Because only a sizable percentage of visits come from desktop browsers instead of most/all of them, then it doesn't make sense to improve things for them? Bizarre reasoning.
    • abalone 8y ago
      You've misrepresented the reasoning. The best practice is: if you're going to tackle a major web UI problem, you should choose an approach that works for mobile (including iPads), which is already about half the traffic to wikipedia and growing. Especially if you are going to invest years of effort. Calling that reasoning "bizarre" is just being deliberately obtuse. To wit, some browser vendors have already started recognizing this problem and solving it in a more general, mobile-compatible way.[1][2] [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/04/28/os-x-tips-preview-links-in-safari-with-a-three-finger-tap https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/04/28/os-x-tips-preview... [2] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/07/8-cool-ways-you-can-be-more-productive-in-safari-with-3d-touch/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/07/8-cool-ways-you-can-...
• aerovistae 8y ago
  How do you turn this feature on? I don't have it.
  • F_r_k 8y ago
    Enable js ?, Or if you are logged, must turn it on
• publicfig 8y ago
  There's a lot of negativity in these comments (which is to be expected, as it is still HN after all) but I've been using the preview boxes for a while now and have to say that I absolutely love them. I use Wikipedia a LOT for primative/secondary research and being able to even just figure out the dates someone lived, the very basic information, or even sometimes just a photo saves me from so many instances of new-tab opening of links that I have to remember the context of after I'm done reading the passage. Really happy to see this is more available now EDIT: This is unrelated, but after reading more of the comments, I legitimately can't believe how absolutely disrespectful and hateful so many of these comments are in here. I appreciate this site as a place where you can express your opinions, even if they aren't just placid support of whoever the OP is, but I really don't want to see this community dive further and further into the echo chamber of hate that it seems to be becoming.
  • agentPrefect 8y ago
    Absolutely agree.
  • barkingcat 8y ago
    To be honest, it's been like this for a long time. If you haven't noticed the negativity, you've been reading a different "hacker's news" than everyone else on the internet.
    • publicfig 8y ago
      To be fair, I've been a regular user under this account for 6 years now, and before that would visit frequently. I know there's always been that component to this place (it's a site publicly available on the web, it's inevitable) but it seems like there has been, maybe just through my perception, a strong rise in the ratio of valid criticism/complaints and seemingly spiteful comments that don't seem to want to accomplish anything other than to incite anger. I have always really appreciated the discussions around here!
  • ravenstine 8y ago
    It's a very noticeable feature too. I was very delighted to recently discover it, and it really does help Wikipedia to continue to be the revolutionary platform it is. Kudos to those who implemented it.
• relics443 8y ago
  I discovered the feature by mistake, and I thought it was cool. I usually browse Wikipedia on my phone, so I don't know if I'd still think it was cool if there are constant false positives on it.
• mistrial9 8y ago
  This is a great collection of comments! because it exposes a deep bias in the readers, who are mainly coders and dev-culture. Guess what ? perfectly machine-readable data is called a DATABASE, and it works well in its scope.. and if you think that all of human knowledge, history, arts and culture are perfectly represented in a DATABASE, then congratulations, you are already more computer than human in your preconceptions. There are several important layers to this onion.. lets call one "participation by non-specialists" .. a second "human factors, aesthetics and publishing arts" .. another is "imperfect intermediate products enable evolution" .. yet another is "taking rules before content" .. Each topic might be an essay in itself.. Generally, I am happy to see XML essentially proposed as the answer to all human information challenges, because it takes less time to blink than to refute it, for me.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    > Guess what ? perfectly machine-readable data is called a DATABASE, and it works well in its scope.. and if you think that all of human knowledge, history, arts and culture are perfectly represented in a DATABASE, then congratulations, you are already more computer than human in your preconceptions. It's on a computer. It is a database. Are you also upset at people who smash the subtle beauty of music into unfeeling bits?
    • PeCaN 8y ago
      >It's on a computer. It is a database. So if I print it out is it not a database anymore?
      • mistrial9 8y ago
        a strong theme in the comments here is that features and amenities are harder to build upon than .. something .. on WMF web pages because WMF internal content is not rigorously defined and enforced.. print is not the point at all, and would take considerations in yet another direction
    • mistrial9 8y ago
• z3t4 8y ago
  This could have been implemented entirely in the client.
• anotherfounder 8y ago
  I feel like this is some dystopian alternate reality post. It took 4 years to release a hover popup! Take that in for a second. And the post seems extremely proud, and self-congratulatory about it. From the post: > Our initial version wasn’t good enough. Our community asked us not to go ahead with it. We answered by listening to them and making it better. This was 2 years ago, and read the comments on the 39 votes it took to not release Hovercards - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29/Archive_131#Proposal:_Enable_Hovercards_by_default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28prop... This meant that the silent majority didn't get these features for 2 years because some considered it 'intrusive'. A feature that you could objectively argue as being a useful utility. If anything, I think this is an indictment of the complaints against Wikipedia from those observing it and ex-employees. While a benevolent dictatorship might be going too far, such a community process where only the loudest voice wins (over considering what is best for MOST of the users), is surely a broken process. I am surprised that product & design people work there at all in such an environment.
  • ckoerner 8y ago
    >And the post seems extremely proud, and self-congratulatory about it. Well, yeah. Doing anything successfully at the scale of Wikipedia is worthy of some praise - and I say that as a US midwesterner - a culture not exactly known as the epitome of hubris. :) You might claim I have Stockholm syndrome or something since I worked with the team that developed this feature, but the discussion you highlight did have valid feedback. The process for respecting community governance and developing consensus is more complicated than any one person could imagine. It is frustrating and imperfect. Folks at the foundation like myself are trying to do better in how we approach, work with, and deploy software changes. I agree too that it took a long time to develop, but that's not on any one single community's shoulders. For instance, after doing due diligence we approached the English community again earlier this month and the result of that discussion was quite boring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Page_Previews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscel... For a technical example that lead to the time it took, the team looked at how we were generating the previews and saw an opportunity to improve them. Previously we tried to parse a bunch of wikitext with a list as long as my arm of exclusions and edge cases. Then the team figured out a way to return HTML summaries from the source article. Not just something useful for this feature and a huge improvement to how information is rendered (like math formulas). Refactoring the code and implementing a new API endpoint took time. I hope this doesn't come across as too argumentative, I wanted to provide an alternative perspective from someone who works daily with product teams and communities within the Wikimedia movement.
• erkose 8y ago
  I commend Wikipedia for providing a configuration option to disable this feature. Netflix could learn a lot from Wikipedia.
• starshadowx2 8y ago
  Wikiwand has had this for years now, and with all the other improvements I still see no reason to not use it.
• CM30 8y ago
  Have to say, I'm pleased they created an algorithm to choose the right thumbnail picture here. So many other inplementations of the same idea just pick the first one on the page, and end up with someone's avatar being the featured image. Indeed, as much as it took a fair bit of time, it seems the reasons behind it are all fairly logical; they actually thought carefully about the functionality and how it should work in various cases rather than just going with something that was 'good enough' to get it out quickly. Not going to complain about that.
• niedzielski 8y ago
  Here's the code: https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Popups https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Popups.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• dxt2129 8y ago
  Replying from Turkey, and oh boy, I can't even load the Wikipedia website.
  • azernik 8y ago
    ... joke, I assume?
  • jdlrobson 8y ago
    :( We miss you! (context: https://ahvalnews.com/freedom-speech/wikipedia-starts-we-miss-turkey-campaign https://ahvalnews.com/freedom-speech/wikipedia-starts-we-mis...)
• mewmew 8y ago
  This is great actually! Thanks a lot for implementing a quick preview feature, perfect for reading an article in one sitting without getting distrcted with side tabs.
• ryanpcmcquen 8y ago
  Yak shaving?
• 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Those summaries are a -big win-. Just hovering over an unfamiliar term gives you enough to get the gist. Greatly improves the value of the hyperlinks, without any injury to their utility if you want more. This should spread...
• akashaggarwal7 8y ago
  I can't thank you enough for this feature. Great work peeps!
• cwyers 8y ago
  They sunk four years of time into this, with developers, UI people, A/B testing... all of it. So they could have thumbnails when you hover over links. And they can't pay the people actually writing the encyclopedia. I hate our current web sometimes. The only skill it seems to know how to reward is writing code. 99% of the value of Wikipedia has nothing to do with code at all. Yet nobody gets rewarded for that.
• nonbel 8y ago
  >"Through our analysis, we wanted to study user behavior towards the Page Previews feature to answer the following questions: How often do people use the feature to preview other pages? We set a threshold of 1000ms (one second) for a preview card to stay open before we counted it as viewed. How often do people disable the feature? It can be disabled by clicking on a settings icon at the bottom of each preview. A high rate in disabling Page Previews would indicate that this is not a feature users want. A low rate indicates users like the feature and would continue using it." https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews/2017-18_A/B_Tests https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews/2017-18_A/B_Tes... My experience was that suddenly something popped up over what I was trying to read so I was confused for a moment (hitting the first metric), but I did not notice the settings icon or expect I would be able to so easily turn these off (thus not hitting the second metric). After reading this I did turn it off. I am definitely not at all a fan of this feature yet would be counted as positive by two different metrics.
• mfoy_ 8y ago
  Just want to say I really like the new feature.
• bobbobo 8y ago
  4 years to come up with basically a hover ad? There's nothing user friendly about this. It's forcing interaction on the user. Hover ads are like this, if you happen to hover over a word as you scrolled then an ad popped up. This is the exact same thing. You're using one of the most hated ad techniques and calling it an enhancement. Show me any UX expert that would approve of this on any site. Show me an advertiser who doesn't love them. And you're not even making money from it. What's wrong with an arrow or button next to the link to activate the page preview if you want? It's a simple answer and it's not deciding you know what's best for the user and shoving something in their face that requires action. This is just piss poor UX. Hovering menu's have been a pain for years and generally not considered good design. Now here you are embedding the equivalent of hover ads in an article meant to be read.