8 ms·

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

48 points by godelmachine 5y ago

slater 5y ago
"We realised HTML was very important" [blank stare]
- cout 5y ago
  This sentence makes a lot more sense in context. They were using a text-only preview, but it didn't work well for a lot of pages.
  - btown 5y ago
    Yep, I feel a lot of us would have tried to use text or some kind of simple Markdown flavor for simplicity! And that isn’t sufficient.
godelmachine 5y ago
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageImages https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageImages They developed an algorithm to choose the best fit image which would appear in the page preview
8bitsrule 5y ago
This is one of the most useful additions to WP in recent years. If you run into a word/phrase you don't know or are fuzzy on, it encourages satisfying your curiousity, saves having to load that page. In the past few months I've also noticed a lot of innovation happening in the maps department. E.g. Ran into a great interactive Mars map the other day.
moralestapia 5y ago
>We had to choose a thumbnail All examples I tried just take the main image from the article (if it exists). >We had to generate a summary Similarly, all I see is, literally, the first sentence of the linked article with some extremely trivial and minor adaptations. >Design design design It is literally a photo and a paragraph of text in the default sans-serif font. I know it's PR but damn.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  >extremely trivial and minor adaptations The article goes into why this wasn't as simple as it seems.
- creatonez 5y ago
  Nope, this article isn't exaggerating about these being difficult decisions. I watched it unfold over the years -- because wikipedia is somewhat of a democracy, the amount of bikeshedding behind the scenes over the years was insane. Every little detail of these preview boxes had to be perfected or else someone would come out with objections. It is actually a miracle that this feature was able to be shipped at all. I'd bet if there was a top-down leadership hierarchy from day 1 of opening the website, rolling out this feature would take less than a month. But Wikipedia would be Microsoft Encarta if it had top-down leadership from day 1.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Wikipedia should be data driven. Let the bikeshedders all try out their design in AB tests, and pick whichever the user metrics say is best. You're going to get much better results that way than spending 4 years writing specifications and having meetings.
    - jhasse 5y ago
      How do you measure "best"?
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        Highest likelyhood of returning to Wikipedia within 30 days, not including the day they saw the info card. If people find a site useful, they will voluntarily return again later. That's a very hard metric to game/abuse. Do not count a user returning from a promo email or browser notification or any of those dark patterns.
    - creatonez 5y ago
Pinus 5y ago
Reading this finally made me figure out how to turn this feature off (to be fair, it was quite straightforward). I find it extremely annoying when there are always things popping up over the text you are trying to read.
- opan 5y ago
  Do you move your mouse cursor along the text you're reading? Or do you move your cursor out of the way and often end up hovering a link?
  - GauntletWizard 5y ago
    I (not OP) highlight text as I'm reading it. Sometimes paragraph at a time, sometimes with frantic mouse movements and clicking highlighting a few words or a sentence at a time. I will admit it's very weird to watch, but it helps my ADHD concentrate.
  - Pinus 5y ago
    I just leave the cursor wherever it happens to be. With link-dense pages, as Wikipedia tends to have, that very often causes a fairly large box to pop up. Also, when scanning a page looking for info and links, I seem to both read and keep the mouse pointer somewhere close to the center of the window, increasing the risk of annoying pop-ups. (Moving the mouse too far away often causes the wrong thing to scroll whey you use the wheel, perhaps not on Wikipedia but on many other sites.)
underwater 5y ago
Wikipedia developed something many though was impossible by assembling thousands (millions?) of volunteers. Why did the solution here need to be algorithmic? Couldn't they scale useful summaries in the same way they scaled the actual article content?
- creatonez 5y ago
  You have to actually get those contributors to show up, which is an issue because wikipedia has been slowly bleeding active contributors for years.
  - grandpoobah 5y ago
    Perhaps a great way to get them to show up, would be to give them the opportunity to be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for an article in their field? :)
- grandpoobah 5y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then I will naively take on some kind of difficult programming challenge requiring lots of hacks and out of the box thinking. These can be quite fun projects, and very rewarding if you make it to the end. But sometimes, as you work your way through the project, and the number of exceptions and edge cases grows, you have to step back and ask yourself is it really worth it? Sunk cost fallacy usually kicks in and you hate yourself for a couple of days, but ultimately you realise it was the right decision. "They were too occupied thinking about how they could do it, that nobody stopped to ask whether they should." I don't know what drives Wikipedia contributors to do what they do, but I imagine there would be a large number of them who would want to go out and be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for as many articles as they possibly could. If the motivation simply isn't there - gamify it somehow.
- dokem 5y ago
  Yes, use a default basic implementation that just grabs the main image and first paragraph with some basic stripping. Then allow authors to later modify the card content specifically. I'm sure it would take a page editor all of 2 minutes to do something like that. This really seemed like perfect is the enemy of good. I also get the feeling that wikipedia is afraid to stand up to the mob of editors.
mFixman 5y ago
The article doesn't mention Navigation Popups[1], a Wikipedia extension that you can activate from you profile that does basically the same thing as the new link previews. I've been using it since 2007, and to me it was always a mystery why it wasn't more discoverable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_pop...
pimlottc 5y ago
Ed: title should be (2018)

48 points by godelmachine 5y ago

slater 5y ago

"We realised HTML was very important" [blank stare]

cout 5y ago
This sentence makes a lot more sense in context. They were using a text-only preview, but it didn't work well for a lot of pages.
- btown 5y ago
  Yep, I feel a lot of us would have tried to use text or some kind of simple Markdown flavor for simplicity! And that isn’t sufficient.

godelmachine 5y ago

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageImages https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PageImages They developed an algorithm to choose the best fit image which would appear in the page preview

8bitsrule 5y ago

This is one of the most useful additions to WP in recent years. If you run into a word/phrase you don't know or are fuzzy on, it encourages satisfying your curiousity, saves having to load that page. In the past few months I've also noticed a lot of innovation happening in the maps department. E.g. Ran into a great interactive Mars map the other day.

moralestapia 5y ago

>We had to choose a thumbnail All examples I tried just take the main image from the article (if it exists). >We had to generate a summary Similarly, all I see is, literally, the first sentence of the linked article with some extremely trivial and minor adaptations. >Design design design It is literally a photo and a paragraph of text in the default sans-serif font. I know it's PR but damn.

bobsmooth 5y ago
>extremely trivial and minor adaptations The article goes into why this wasn't as simple as it seems.
creatonez 5y ago
Nope, this article isn't exaggerating about these being difficult decisions. I watched it unfold over the years -- because wikipedia is somewhat of a democracy, the amount of bikeshedding behind the scenes over the years was insane. Every little detail of these preview boxes had to be perfected or else someone would come out with objections. It is actually a miracle that this feature was able to be shipped at all. I'd bet if there was a top-down leadership hierarchy from day 1 of opening the website, rolling out this feature would take less than a month. But Wikipedia would be Microsoft Encarta if it had top-down leadership from day 1.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Wikipedia should be data driven. Let the bikeshedders all try out their design in AB tests, and pick whichever the user metrics say is best. You're going to get much better results that way than spending 4 years writing specifications and having meetings.
  - jhasse 5y ago
    How do you measure "best"?
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      Highest likelyhood of returning to Wikipedia within 30 days, not including the day they saw the info card. If people find a site useful, they will voluntarily return again later. That's a very hard metric to game/abuse. Do not count a user returning from a promo email or browser notification or any of those dark patterns.
  - creatonez 5y ago

Pinus 5y ago

Reading this finally made me figure out how to turn this feature off (to be fair, it was quite straightforward). I find it extremely annoying when there are always things popping up over the text you are trying to read.

opan 5y ago
Do you move your mouse cursor along the text you're reading? Or do you move your cursor out of the way and often end up hovering a link?
- GauntletWizard 5y ago
  I (not OP) highlight text as I'm reading it. Sometimes paragraph at a time, sometimes with frantic mouse movements and clicking highlighting a few words or a sentence at a time. I will admit it's very weird to watch, but it helps my ADHD concentrate.
- Pinus 5y ago
  I just leave the cursor wherever it happens to be. With link-dense pages, as Wikipedia tends to have, that very often causes a fairly large box to pop up. Also, when scanning a page looking for info and links, I seem to both read and keep the mouse pointer somewhere close to the center of the window, increasing the risk of annoying pop-ups. (Moving the mouse too far away often causes the wrong thing to scroll whey you use the wheel, perhaps not on Wikipedia but on many other sites.)

underwater 5y ago

Wikipedia developed something many though was impossible by assembling thousands (millions?) of volunteers. Why did the solution here need to be algorithmic? Couldn't they scale useful summaries in the same way they scaled the actual article content?

creatonez 5y ago
You have to actually get those contributors to show up, which is an issue because wikipedia has been slowly bleeding active contributors for years.
- grandpoobah 5y ago
  Perhaps a great way to get them to show up, would be to give them the opportunity to be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for an article in their field? :)
grandpoobah 5y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then I will naively take on some kind of difficult programming challenge requiring lots of hacks and out of the box thinking. These can be quite fun projects, and very rewarding if you make it to the end. But sometimes, as you work your way through the project, and the number of exceptions and edge cases grows, you have to step back and ask yourself is it really worth it? Sunk cost fallacy usually kicks in and you hate yourself for a couple of days, but ultimately you realise it was the right decision. "They were too occupied thinking about how they could do it, that nobody stopped to ask whether they should." I don't know what drives Wikipedia contributors to do what they do, but I imagine there would be a large number of them who would want to go out and be the first to write a summary and select/upload a picture for as many articles as they possibly could. If the motivation simply isn't there - gamify it somehow.
dokem 5y ago
Yes, use a default basic implementation that just grabs the main image and first paragraph with some basic stripping. Then allow authors to later modify the card content specifically. I'm sure it would take a page editor all of 2 minutes to do something like that. This really seemed like perfect is the enemy of good. I also get the feeling that wikipedia is afraid to stand up to the mob of editors.

mFixman 5y ago

The article doesn't mention Navigation Popups[1], a Wikipedia extension that you can activate from you profile that does basically the same thing as the new link previews. I've been using it since 2007, and to me it was always a mystery why it wasn't more discoverable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_pop...

pimlottc 5y ago

Ed: title should be (2018)