Help:Reference Previews



The Reference Previews feature shows a preview of a footnote when you hover over its footnote marker. This feature is part of the MediaWiki extension extpopups>Extension:Popups|Popups, which is used for pagepreviews>Page_Previews|Page Previews. It's currently a beta feature.

Background
More information can be found on the RefPreviews>m:WMDE Technical Wishes/ReferencePreviews|main project page on Meta.

Activate the feature
Reference Previews will first be available as a beta feature. In order to use it, you have to
 * be logged in and tick the checkbox for "Reference Previews" in your setBeta>Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures|beta feature settings,
 * setGadgets>Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets|disable [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups Navigation Popups ] (otherwise, Reference Previews won't show),
 * disable the RefTooltips>Reference_Tooltips|Reference Tooltips gadget (recommended, because otherwise two pop-ups will appear).

Look and behavior


Scope of the very first version of this feature:
 * The pop-up opens when you hover over or when you click on a footnote marker.
 * It gives a preview of the footnote as it is shown at the bottom of the page. Inside the preview, all kinds of footnote content (text, images, tables, …) can be displayed.
 * Reference Previews look like pagepreviews>Page_Previews|Page Previews. This way, all pop-ups have the same design, no matter if you hover over a page link or a footnote marker.
 * At the top of the pop-up, the reference type is shown (more info below).
 * For short footnotes, the pop-up window adjusts to a smaller size. If the footnote size exceeds the maximum pop-up size, you can scroll to read the whole footnote.
 * Clicking on the link "Jump to reference" brings you to the actual footnote in the footnote section.
 * Links that are part of a footnote open in a new tab.
 * After the beta phase, a settings cog will take you to your user settings for this feature.

Displaying the reference type


First tests have shown that displaying the type of a reference can help readers evaluate its trustworthiness more quickly; e.g. a journal publication is more trustworthy than a blog post.

This is how the categorization works:


 * Currently there are four types of references defined: Web Reference, Journal Reference, Book Reference and News Reference. Apart from that there is always a generic "default" type, which is simply named Reference.


 * Technically speaking, the type of a reference is defined by CSS-classes, e.g.   for journal references. These classes are set in the   element in a reference's content (classExamples>Page_Content_Service/References#Example 3: Various citation types|more info).


 * On most wikis, you can assign a class to a reference by using templates. For example, the English  templates specify their respective class already. Classes can be added to other templates as well.


 * Alternatively, you can add a cite class directly into a ref tag, e.g.  .


 * References without cite tags and classes (e.g. plain <tvar|refExample1></> tags) are shown as "Reference".

JavaScript
The preview uses JavaScript. If you don't have JavaScript activated, you'll get the current view: Footnote markers are jump marks and there's no preview.

Deployment roadmap

 * ✅ test.wikipedia.org : 2019-02-28
 * beta feature on :
 * ✅ German Wikipedia: 2019-04-04
 * ✅ Arabic Wikipedia: 2019-04-04
 * all wikis that use the Popups extension (all Wikipedias & en, he and zh Wikivoyages): 2019-10-24

Links

 * extension manual on MediaWiki.org

Reference Previews
 * project board on Phabricator
 * main project page on Meta
 * central feedback page on MediaWiki.org

Page Previews
 * main project page on MediaWiki.org
 * central feedback page on MediaWiki.org

Help with translation
The software messages for this feature can be translated on translate wiki. Any help is much appreciated!