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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

#241

Post by Symbiote »

fireattack wrote: post #202
Symbiote wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, they've also removed the ability to switch to other languages on the normal Wikipedia. The sidebar shows some major languages (German, Hindi etc), but not the ones I'm trying to learn. Clicking the "more" button then has the most ridiculous UI ever: "Suggested languages"! What is the point of suggesting Yiddish to me?!

What? It will remember what languages you have clicked and put them outside. This feature is a godsend, I no longer need to scroll hundreds of languages to find the one I need.

Hmm, is that a recent addition? Or perhaps there was a bug.

I can see it sets uls-previous-languages in local storage, but if it had been working like this before today, I'm sure it wouldn't have annoyed me.

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

#242

Post by jgtrosh »

kqr wrote: post #239
jgtrosh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extremist view in this sense is that tabs in general are a bad model for navigation. If all the pages you choose to visit are first-level citizens in your environment (windows) then you think about them more actively. A browser like https://surf.suckless.org simplifies the browser abstraction well in these regards. I have found it is nearly impossible to get common browsers to work without tabs. This kind of ende…

I strongly agree. I had to stop using Surf because of its ancient rendering engine which butchers a lot of the sensible parts of the modern web, but I do miss the tabless part of it. Edit: Also because it does not have Pentadactyl. My dream browser would be tabless and with sensible and powerful Vim bindings. Ideally built on an engine of Common Lisp too...

Have you looked at luakit? It's also based on webkit2gtk but it's extensible with Lua; I love the simplicity of suckless tools but when a functionality that seems good must be patched in it rarely ends well.

Also regarding Vi keybindings check out vimb maybe?

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

#243

Post by nonbel »

>"Through our analysis, we wanted to study user behavior towards the Page Previews feature to answer the following questions:

How often do people use the feature to preview other pages? We set a threshold of 1000ms (one second) for a preview card to stay open before we counted it as viewed.

How often do people disable the feature? It can be disabled by clicking on a settings icon at the bottom of each preview. A high rate in disabling Page Previews would indicate that this is not a feature users want. A low rate indicates users like the feature and would continue using it."

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews/2017-18_A/B_Tes...

My experience was that suddenly something popped up over what I was trying to read so I was confused for a moment (hitting the first metric), but I did not notice the settings icon or expect I would be able to so easily turn these off (thus not hitting the second metric). After reading this I did turn it off.

I am definitely not at all a fan of this feature yet would be counted as positive by two different metrics.

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

#244

Post by le-mark »

jotux wrote: post #174
lucideer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I'm a little confused as well. I skimmed through the comments a second time to see if I missed something but none of the negative comments look especially disrespectful or hateful. Mostly just people complaining that they don't like pop-ups or find the feature useful. That said, I intentionally try to read text online in the most charitable voice possible, so maybe my perception is very different from others.

Charity in discourse, particularly online, is good policy for everyone[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

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

#245

Post by isaacremuant »

yarrel wrote: post #205
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…

Describing the comments here as "an echo chamber of hate" is inaccurate and serves to raise the temperature in itself.

It's inaccurate, it's distracting and it discourages people from contributing with criticism.

It's an appeal to emotion, too.

There are modding tools to make sure people aren't trolling or being too aggressive against other users but discourse shouldn't be censored due to offense.

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

#247

Post by d0lph »

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…

What information could you not store in a database?

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

#248

Post by anotherfounder »

tim333 wrote: post #231
anotherfounder wrote: post #176

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 4 years to officially release. It's been available as a beta since 2014 and I've been using it for ages https://lifehacker.com/the-best-wikipedia-features-still-in-...

How many of those readers would know that you have to create an account and then know to turn it on?

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

#249

Post by sicariusnoctis »

simias wrote: post #44
Numberwang wrote: post #26

I personally always use the mobile version https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for desktop these days. I much prefer it to the standard version.

I hate that I don't have the bar on the left to be able to switch to a different language conveniently. I use it all the time and I've no idea if it's even accessible at all in the mobile version. The mobile version also wastes a ton of screen real-estate but I guess that's fashionable these days. I really enjoy Wikipedia but the #1 item on my feature wishlist is "redirect me towards the non-mobile version of the sit…

If you use the beta version (you should; it typically has useful features), you can swipe in from the right.

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

#250

Post by ckoerner »

anotherfounder wrote: post #248
tim333 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well 4 years to officially release. It's been available as a beta since 2014 and I've been using it for ages https://lifehacker.com/the-best-wikipedia-features-still-in-...

How many of those readers would know that you have to create an account and then know to turn it on?

None. They don't need to know that. The feature is on by default without logging-in.
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