Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.wikimedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 255 posts

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

#161

Post by abalone »

buildawesome wrote: post #149
abalone wrote: post #137

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.)

I imagine it's because they see high readership on desktop browsers.

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-sit...

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

#162

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

mistrial9 wrote: post #160

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 preconcept…

> 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?

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

#163

Post by abalone »

publicfig wrote: post #145

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…

There's a rule against excessive negativity but respectful, constructive criticism is an important role that HN plays here. Here's a feature that wades into what is arguably browser vendor territory, rethinking the way that hyperlinks work.[1] Is it a good pattern we should adopt throughout the web?

Does its on-by-defaut nature disrupt the reading experience? Does summarizing linked content have problems? What about mobile (now approx. half of traffic and growing)?

I see a few comments using the word "hate" but for the most part the negative ones are just critical, with supporting points. I think a fundamental design pattern like this is worth some scrutiny alongside the support.

[1] Case in point: Safari implemented a feature similar to this a few years ago. It works generally across all sites, uses reserved gestures (3D Touch on mobile, 3-finger-tap on desktop) to gives users full control, and sidesteps the whole summarization problem by using more screen real estate to just show a bigger preview.

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

#164

Post by PeCaN »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #162
mistrial9 wrote: post #160

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 preconcept…

> 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…

>It's on a computer. It is a database.

So if I print it out is it not a database anymore?

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

#165

Post by lucideer »

publicfig wrote: post #145

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…

Responding to your edit on respectful commenting, I can't see any disrespectful comments in this thread (and generally find discourse on HN better than other places). Have some been deleted?

The top-level comments are mostly positive, with one or two constructively critical ones. There are one or two sub-comments with strongly worded criticism of Wikipedia's markup (the code holding the text), but none that mention people or are in any way ad hominem.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #150
ryanjshaw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard did you try? These are not hand-written pages, and their output is actually pretty clean compared to the crazy things I've tried to scrape. They have tons of APIs to access the backing data, and that should be your first stop. Even if you insist on scraping, in your case you're just looking for a whose immediately preceding contains the text "Latest Release", and that's something any XPath-based scraper can…

> Even if you insist on scraping, in your case you're just looking for a whose immediately preceding contains the text "Latest Release", and that's something any XPath-based scraper can give you straight out of the box Sure, until it changes. Here it is in Jan 2016 when it was included in the opening paragraphs as the text "The latest version of OS X is ". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MacOS&oldid=69769.…

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by lucideer »

incogitomode wrote: post #159
lucideer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a Wikipedia account you can set this theme as your default theme in your account preferences without having to visit the m. domain.

Mind giving a pointer? Would love to default to the mobile view, but haven't been able to find the setting you're referring to. Google hasn't helped.

When you're logged in, it's the "MinervaNeue" option here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsec...

Sidenote, if—like me—you actually prefer the desktop theme, and would like the opposite: to use it on mobile. There is a mobile-friendly version of it in the works, but not yet available. You can try the in-progress version on your mobile here: https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?mobilaction=toggle...

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

#168

Post by jdlrobson »

fapjacks wrote: post #11

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, otherwis…

<3 message received from //everyone// involved in its creation. Thanks!

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

#169

Post by dc3k »

ckoerner wrote: post #114
stedaniels wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should really be some "hover intent" going on if there isn't already and it just needs tweaking maybe?

IIRC the delay value is set at 500ms before a preview is shown.

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.

Post reply on HN