Wikipedia Preview

Background
When readers navigate in and out of a webpage through interacting with several hyperlinks, they can easily lose context of what they were reading in the first place. Content sites would like their readers to read and engage with their content and understand it without having to get contextual information elsewhere. Wikipedia Preview can solve this problem for content providers by allowing readers to have concise and visual contextual information from Wikipedia within a content provider’s mobile properties - website or webapp.

The Page previews feature on Wikipedia was created to solve the problem of context switching for desktop readers. This feature extends that functionality to external 3rd party sites. The first phase will focus on building a mobile led experience with partners whose primary readers are in emerging markets.

About Wikipedia Preview
Wikipedia Preview would allow Wikimedia project content available as contextual information on 3rd party sites. The feature will not be restricted to only showing the first sentences of a Wikipedia article, it will be as diverse as showing information from sister projects which could be images, definitions or even reading much more of an article directly on the content provider’s website.

This feature is not new. It was discussed when page previews launched in 2018. Internal staff and volunteers have created similar functionality in chrome extensions, slack integrations and wordpress plugins in their personal capacity as volunteers.

The Inuka team is taking on this work as one of the ways to expose our project content to readers in emerging markets. We see this product as a way of moving away from the traditional notion of single monolithic articles and moving towards more modular and contextual learning. Wikipedia Preview on partner websites would allow their readers to gain context while reading their pages and:


 * Help people gain contextual knowledge from Wikipedia without necessarily clicking through to Wikipedia
 * Learn more on Wikipedia with the option being available to read more on Wikipedia

Goal

 * Increase reach of Wikipedia content in Emerging Markets as part of the goal to become the essential infrastructure of free knowledge
 * Partner with sites in emerging markets whose readers would benefit from contextual knowledge from Wikipedia

Updates
Q1 2020/2021

Created a demo site that supports multiple languages to show how Wikipedia Preview works. Try it out here The experience is designed for use on smartphones.

Code base
https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-preview