181–190 of 255 posts
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.)
Bizarre reasoning.
> 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…
I sincerely regret the use of that statement "people seem to like it" in my post. I've now removed it as I worry this confuses my message so thank you for pointing it out. This really trivializes all the work that went into A/B testing this and how we measured success. I really recommend a read of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews#Success_Metrics... Side note: the volume of traffic was also wrong by several magnitudes... actually 0.5 million)
My main motivation when writing this post was to share how small changes require magnitudes of effort not to express the merits of the feature. As a developer who works with product owners a lot and often get asked how I can build things quicker (I'm sure many can relate). I wanted to provide something useful to other developers that easy looking things are not actually easy to build, so thanks for flagging.
With regards to the user script, yeh that's been around for some time and was the seed for this idea. It's just taken a long time to get that from such a small audience to a mainstream one. It doesn't downplay it in my opinion, just shows how far we've come.
Thanks for reading.
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…
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_(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.
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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...
> 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.
> 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…
Also, is 5K hits/minute really that impressive? According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm , English Wikipedia gets 88K views per minute.
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…
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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?mobilactio…
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.
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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…
I hit the same thing recently, but that's basically what Wikidata was founded for - and I'm sure it has the latest version of macOS. It's really easy to fetch Wikidata data using the Wikidata API (my example: https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/blob/master/ind... )
