131–140 of 255 posts
TL;DR: they had to choose a thumbnail and summary. I have been using WikiWand for years, which not only did that but also makes reading Wikipedia much better. Maybe I'm the only one but I have the hardest time reading paragraphs with lots of words per line. Previously I had to resize the browser each time I had to read something in Wikipedia :|
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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…
They're like a soap opera for geeks
> 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 personally do not care for the link preview feature as I am one of those people who like to hover over a link so I can see the url leads (which is also why I detest URL shorteners). I also have to wonder how much bandwidth Wikipedia is going to end up using to display unneeded previews.
This is interesting. There's an external arrow for external links, so I'm still good with this use case for inspecting links; for internal links I've found myself hovering where I previously clicked (and loaded) an additional page at least 50% of the time. Where I'm OK with a quick paragraph description and can then decide if the linked paragraph requires / inspires a deeper read, about 50% of the time.
I think this is a net reduction of bandwidth for my personal use-case. Wide A/B testing would reveal more, obviously.
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…
It's frustrating that every popular webpage nowadays is so full of distractions that I can't use the web without blocking a lot of it.
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I imagine most people spend more time reading on Wikipedia as opposed to trying to hover over every link available?
That's less than one API hit per 17 English pages viewed - the overwhelming majority of the time, users do not use this feature at all, based on these numbers. This response is pure sophistry.
I worry about the impact for accessibility-oriented users.
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.)
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…
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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.
What’s frustrating is that this has been brought up as an issue on StackExchange and rejected as WONTFIX.
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 unbelieva…