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

Post by TuringTest » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:57 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #19

shakna wrote: post #9

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.

Wikipedia's markup is just terrible for trying to do any sort of scraping or analysis. I once tried to write a script that pulled the latest version of macOS from the sidebar of this article[1] and I gave up because it was difficult and brittle in a way that made it nearly impossible. I'd probably have better results parsing the HTML with a regex. Likewise, I know a friend who literally had to scrap an entire project…

Post by _delirium » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #36

_delirium wrote: post #14

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.

> they've defaulted it to off for existing logged-in users I see these even when logged out.

Post by iofiiiiiiiii » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 10:02 AM UTC

panic wrote: post #23

majewsky wrote: post #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 sam…

> 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.

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 10:05 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #43

saagarjha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've defaulted it to off for existing logged-in users I see these even when logged out.

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).

Post by TuringTest » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 10:06 AM UTC

xab9 wrote: post #17

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.