Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
blog.wikimedia.org
Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
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Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#2I remember seeing those preview for weeks (months) but the article publication date is 20th of April.
It's pretty cool :).
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#3Or 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.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#4TL;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 :|
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#5One 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?
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#6Can I access this API externally, e.g. by sending a http get request to some endpoint, to get the summary content in JSON format?
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#7Or 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.
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.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#8> 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.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#9I 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.
Re: Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia
#10One 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?
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.