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

blog.wikimedia.org

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by jessriedel »

SeanMacConMara wrote: post #95
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. in my case every single time was by accident whilst moving the mouse around, off of other text I was trying to read. frankly, its bloody annoying it covered the text i was reading the search for yet another "disable" setting begins....

> the search for yet another "disable" setting begins....

Your inability to figure out how to disable it was already counted as success!

> the rates of disabling the feature are negligibly low — a strong indicator that people find it useful.

https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/w...

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

#124

Post by Nadya »

worble wrote: post #86
xab9 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it's not "done right". It's a table layout from the nineties. But probably there's an api so noone would have to scrape a wiki page, I never needed to do that fortunately :)

And what exactly is not "done right" about that? If it displays the information it's supposed to in a clean and organised way, and loads as fast as any other website, then I couldn't care less if it's a '90's table layout' or using whatever the hot new JS framework is.

Try to read today's Featured Article in a text-to-speech program. The markup is so mangled it can't even read a complete sentence because it breaks anytime the text links out.

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

#125

Post by baud147258 »

fapjacks wrote: post #89
azeirah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia's a minefield for people with ADD, yep. But oddly enough, I found that Stackoverflow's "hot questions" or whatever thing is equally distracting. I'm on a professional software developer network, and then I see a super interesting and legitimate question aaaaaannnddd... I'm in a rabbithole. Don't know if it's helpful or not for you, but I found an extension that limits the maximum amount of tabs you can have…

Oh, yes, SO's hot network questions is a hardcore distraction for me, too. Even for things I really don't care about! Like all those workplace drama questions (do so many people really think going to HR is going to do them any good at all?). The extension you linked is a very interesting concept, something I hadn't thought about using before. But I like the idea of paying a little bit of thought up front to help keep…

SO's hot network questions was so bad that I enabled my ad-blocker on SO and added a custom rule to hide that part of the page. At least now when I go to find an answer on SO without falling in a 30-60 min rabbit hole.

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

#126

Post by mygo »

SeanMacConMara wrote: post #95
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. in my case every single time was by accident whilst moving the mouse around, off of other text I was trying to read. frankly, its bloody annoying it covered the text i was reading the search for yet another "disable" setting begins....

“We thought the floating pop-up billboard showing you a preview of what’s inside when you glance at a building was a great feature as you walk down times square”

— bad UX designers in 2070

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

#127

Post by kreetx »

azeirah wrote: post #81
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…

Wikipedia's a minefield for people with ADD, yep. But oddly enough, I found that Stackoverflow's "hot questions" or whatever thing is equally distracting. I'm on a professional software developer network, and then I see a super interesting and legitimate question aaaaaannnddd... I'm in a rabbithole. Don't know if it's helpful or not for you, but I found an extension that limits the maximum amount of tabs you can have…

Clearly you have too much free time at work ;-)

Just kidding, know how those rabbitholes are.

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

#128

Post by mygo »

jwilk wrote: post #24
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…

Also, is 5K hits/minute really that impressive? According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm , English Wikipedia gets 88K views per minute.

but how many of those views are on mobile devices?

this is a desktop feature. in general, mobile traffic > desktop traffic.

we’d need wikipedia’s browsing statistics be sure, since some sites see different ratios than others. What if 1:8 wikipedia visits are on desktop? That would make the 5K/minute much more significant.

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

#129

Post by thelastidiot »

Not to criticize the hard work that went into doing this feature (I worked on a project using wikipedia/wiktionary data), all the things that had to be achieved to come up with a "simple" preview features are just made hard because the data in wiki media is not machine friendly. Things like the obvious priority order of fields and bizarre templates that one needs to implement to parse the data makes the job unbelievably hard in the first place.

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

#130

Post by scrooched_moose »

thought_alarm wrote: post #113
tombrossman wrote: post #97

One of the best things about ad blockers is that they are really just general purpose content blockers. Want to disable this permanently? Here's an Adblock Plus-compatible filter to block the div if you find it annoying. Tested and working on uBlock Origin: ! Disable link preview popups on Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org##.mwe-popups It's just a div with the class ".mwe-popups", and using your ad blocker will persist the…

You can disable them by clicking the little gear icon on the pop up itself. I figured that out by googling aroung for half an hour. It's just wretched, backwards UI all around.

As OP stated, that's tied to your cookies though and won't be a "permanent" solution.
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