Why it took a long time to build that tiny link preview on Wikipedia (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why it took a long time to build that tiny link preview on Wikipedia (2018)

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47 pointstosh47 comments

I guess 2018 must be when I blocked wikipedia with noscript. I am sure some people find the feature useful, I did not...and as a bonus I don't get the requests for money. YMMV.

What is wrong with the requests for money? Wikipedia ads are the least intrusive of ads.

A lot of people are annoyed that the foundation has significant reserves, enough that much of it's budgets is grants, yet puts out messages like they are in dire need for cash. I think it's mostly fine, though annoying, but a lot of people disagree with it in principal.

https://archive.is/yg5RW

https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...

The grants thing is a bit misleading - a lot of the grants are to affiliate organizations in other countries. So for example if Wikimedia germany writes some code for the wikipedia site, it is probably funded by a grant from wikipedia donations.

I dont claim everything wikimedia foundation does is useful or that there isn't any wasted money. They are also definitely past the "keep the lights on stage", but you cant do anything useful if you only keep the lights on. Mostly i just think discussing if the budget of a multimillion dollar organization that runs one of the most popular websites in the world is reasonable requires a lot more nuance than most discussons on the internet have.

They are also under fire for putting misleading adverts in low-income countries like Brazil and India, sounding like they are going to be sold if they don't get enough donation.

Didn’t they make all that money off a weird porn site that had nude women posing with cats?

If you mean bomis, jimmy wales may have made some money off it (although i think most of his money comes from wikia/fandom not bomis), and maybe some very initial seed money/in-kind hosting came from there in the very early years (idk), but wikipedia is a separate entity from all that, and generally did not get money from bomis.

So no.

Little Gray Guy, as I recall.

> Wikipedia ads are the least intrusive of ads.

Wikipedia's ads take up the entire screen. How could they be more intrusive than that?

When I saw that Wikipedia has a bar/event space in Berlin. I decided I will never donate to them again. They don't know how to manage money. At the scale they run, their software should be way leaner than it is. It's shameful.

Wikimedia Deutschland exists for 20 years, has their own fundraising team which seams quite successfull based on sums raised, has their headquarters in Berlin and employ like 160 people.

From what I read "bar" hosts events every week at worst, including other orgs and initiatives, like Open Data or Open Content (sorry if I use wrong names, I used German article and my German is really bad).

I am always in awe how low is the knowledge of the scale of open initiatives in Germany. Linux distros, openstreetmap contributions, many open data initiatives, businesses developing OSS and offering support to it, or plainly promoting opensource and develepmont among citizens from early age. I'm humbled by their contribution to truly open initiatives and would not blink an eye if they "wasted" rent money for a single place. Also it's pennies compared to contributions they bring.

To any Germans reading, as much as us Poles can't shake off tension between our countries, we still see what you are doing. A true and honest hats off, to what you are doing to education and how vast is understanding of openness in your average citizen.

P.s. Wikimedia HQ is in San Francisco, I wonder how is the rent there...

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiB%C3%A4r

What is this in reference to? Where is this bar?

I find them intrusive, as well as dishonest. They give off a "poor little us" mom-and-pop-shop vibe, which must be very misleading to people who don't know how well funded they are.

> What is wrong with the requests for money? Wikipedia ads are the least intrusive of ads.

Did you forget the /s?

you use it anyway for free though right?

Enshitification is slower on Wikipedia than elsewhere, but sadly still happening. I'm still upset about the language button that cause me one additional click instead of the direct links on the left menu.

Fwiw,if you are logged in you can switch your skin in Special:preferences to bring the old look back.

If you don't want to log in you can add ?useskin=vector to any wikipedia URL to get the same. There's a few others as well and they have a bookmarklet you can add to just click on to switch the current page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin

logged in? do people that are not editors do that?

I mean, if you hate the new skin enough, seems like a valid reason.

Not really any downside. Remember my log in has an expiry of about a year so you don't have to be continously logging in. Banner ads are not shown to logged in users which is nice. Wikimedia doesn't really do tracking of reads, so dont have to worry about that (i mean, i suppose web servers have logs, but that is true if logged out too). I suppose maybe its slightly slower since only logged out views are handled by geolocated servers so there is a bit more latency if you aren't in north america.

This sort of thing is a dang nightmare. Perk your mouse in the wrong place or scroll and stop at the wrong place with your mouse over the page and all of a sudden you're not reading what you were reading. This is happening all over the place on the web and an apps. Sometimes it's moderately useful like this looks like it could be but sometimes it's just completely superfluous.

Agreed, and I'm not the only one to think this. The hover previews are SO DISTRACTING because I move my mouse around when I read an article, and I also like to select text to visually maintain my reading position. I have accidentally clicked into the previewed link quite a few times before, forcing me to hit the back button to compensate.

I'd like to see a similar write-up for dark mode. It took 20 years and it still says "beta" even though its basically switching a CSS template. Its a pattern I've seen over many different websites, so there must be a common reason.

Mostly, there's a large amount of CSS that has been written over the years that assumed it was on a light-colored website. In mediawiki itself, in mediawiki extensions, in gadgets and userscripts, and in site-specific overrides across all the Wikiprojects. Most annoyingly to deal with, sometimes hardcoded into pages -- table formatting on wikipedia is often using inline styles to get specific background colors, for instance.

You can see a few hundred tickets about dark-mode related issues if you're curious what's been done and why it's still in beta: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/8zofdVSnra...

(I work for Wikimedia. I didn't work on dark mode, beyond a few minor adjustments to components I do work on to be compatible with it.)

Wow, that link is a great resource. Thanks for the info

The answer is somewhere between - nobody really cared enough to try until the last few years, combined with allowing users to write their own css means there is a very long tail of content that is assuming light mode which needs to be fixed.

I quite like this feature - so much so I've been pushing to build something similar out at work.

The main missing piece is mobile / touch. Not sure if anyone's aware of iterations that solve for this?

I wonder why they didn’t do the obvious thing for a crowd sourced site and introduce a manual way to define this content.

CMS’s for news publishers have distinct fields for link title and thumbnail images (appearing on the linking page) and article title and hero images (appearing on the destination page).

This seems redundant until you consider that the context for linking pages and the article page are different. Having clean summaries for each page on Wikipedia seems like it would be useful in many places.

Why it took a long time to build that tiny link preview on Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27260304 - May 2021 (27 comments)

Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16901599 - April 2018 (243 comments)

Is this the same link preview that Eliezer Yudkowsky claimed to have invented first on the Lex Fridman podcast?

tl;dr it's the same feature he's talking about, but also he's wrong in a very Yudkowsky way.

I was curious about this so I hunted it down: https://youtu.be/AaTRHFaaPG8?si=NbIe3hBSovvOQA-G&t=4483

He speculates that Wikipedia got the idea from Arbital. Insofar as I can tell, that seems to be a wiki-like website that started around 2015 -- I had never heard of it, so it might be older? That does predate this specific implementation of popups on Wikipedia, which is from 2018.

The fun context here is actually discussed in the article -- the genesis of the Wikipedia popups was a community gadget on Wikipedia (Navigation Popups) that's from much earlier. Oldest version I could casually dig up on Wikipedia is from 2007. Unless Arbital is vastly older than I think (older than LessWrong itself, which is from 2009), the chain of inspiration is presumably in the other direction. Or completely independent.

The article is, overall, about why it took so long to go from that working example to something more robust.

For me, the idea that one could even lay claim to having "invented" a feature like that is very suspicious. Surely it was discovered independently by several people and the stakes are so low in any case that it just felt like Yudkowsky trying to get technical credit for it by having it edited into his wikipedia after regurgitating it on a popular podcast (or something similarly shady and ultimately petty).

The actions of a man who is insecure about his lack of accomplishments (aside from having money and using that money to prop himself up).

Thank goodness for OpenGraph.

Horrible feature.

Can you please share with us what is so bad about this feature?

It's extremely annoying to have shit randomly popping up to cover what I'm trying to read.

It's so annoying that I can't comprehend how anyone can't find it annoying.

Personally I love them, but fyi you can disable by clicking the wheel icon https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews#Logged-Out_User...

Thanks, in my 34 years sitting in front of a computer, I never learned that you can change settings.

Your tone comes across as sarcastic, yet I cannot believe you haven't met at least several people who have used computers for 34+ years who didn't know you can change some basic setting.

I agree, however pop-ups are the worst

Can a link please just work like a link and not blast some unwanted content over what I'm reading?

Why are you hovering over the links? Nobody is blasting anything.

I find this to be a strange question which blames users for a certain action when the action has been the norm for over 30 years.

hovering over links you don't want to open is a norm?

When you're not actively trying to click on anything, you shouldn't have to be overly worried about where your cursor is. It's especially stupid that your cursor can be in a safe, non-reactive area of the article, and then you scroll down and now your cursor is hovering over a link and the pop-up shows up even though your cursor didn't move.

Hovering shouldn't be used for something this big. It should only be used for things very similar to its original purpose in web browsing: small visual feedback to indicate that the element under the cursor is interactive and will make something significant happen after the user clicks. (But the interactivity of an element still needs to be apparent even before or without the visual confirmation that comes from hovering. This is even more important in a world with touchscreens where hover events aren't available—and that lack of hover events for a large portion of users is another strong reason not to put any big important functionality behind those events.)

I'll do what I like with links, and I appreciate it when they behave in the conventional manner.

Cursor’s got to go somewhere.

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