Wikipedia's New Page Previews: How They Work for You

Wikipedia's New Page Previews: How They Work for You

If you've visited Wikipedia lately, you might have noticed that a very distinct and useful change has been made: page previews. I admit that I myself might have lived under a rock about this for awhile had I not read about it recently, and that owes to never relying on Wikipedia for my research these days, but that's beside the point. One of the biggest gripes I always had with using the site was needing to open 20 tabs of references just to understand what I was reading on a single page of a single topic. That aggravation seems to have evaporated with the inclusion of a little markup magic by a team of clever developers.

Page previews can be observed by mousing over a hyperlink in the text, which will generate a convenient fly-out window with a brief summary of what, exactly, this item is. The next time you're on Wikipedia's entry about antimatter and you're wondering what baryogenesis is, you now have page previews to make the explanation simple and up-front without blowing up your browser with an ungodly number of tabs. It seems that we ordinary users aren't alone in our browsing pains; some clever man or woman out there was on a similar wavelength while doing a little research of their own, it seems.

In any case, I remember reading about this months ago. There was some dispute among the developers over how the image-to-text ratio should be balanced, and some commenters even felt that it was unnecessary to include an image at all. There were concerns over bandwidth and memory consumption, but if you check out the final result, it appears that the previews load independently when you mouse over the links, which means that the page loads first. I guess those concerns have been ironed out since then, but frankly, it's 2018 — is anyone actually worried about petty limits like this anymore?

In any case, here are some interesting numbers to chew over:

• Roughly two million links receive the hover treatment every minute on Wikipedia.
• Around 230 million page views are owed to blue links every month. Gee, that's a shocker.
• More than a quarter of Wikipedia's traffic is owed to blue links. Think of them as rabbit holes. For more information click here https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/04/18/how-we-designed-page-previews-for-wikipedia/.

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