Page Previews/preferences

About
As you may know, there is a discussion going on about enabling hovercards/link previews for Wikipedia on the desktop site. We would like to address all concerns about this feature before we advocate for its release.

One of the bigger design challenges for this feature came up during the initial analysis. Disabling hover cards should be easier for logged in and anonymous users. This brings up the need for a place to set user preferences without a user being logged in.

This community consultation is around “Reading Preferences” and where they should sit, so that even anonymous users can customize their Wikipedia experience.

Please vote on the approach you think works for Wikipedia.

Approach 1
Create a new, convenient and easy to access modal window for “Reading Preferences” There will always be a settings button on all articles where users can change their preferences for reading.

This also can house the accessibility preferences we are yet to implement. Viz. Font size, contrast and night reading mode. It will have only the hovercard enable/disable feature to begin with, and we can extend to have other reading settings in the future.


 * How it will look

Reading preference button on article Reading preference modal window - ONLY Hovercard preference Reading preference modal window - Future of reading preferences

Vote for this approach

Approach 2
In this approach we simply extend the current preferences page (Special:Preferences) to include the hovercard preferences. This means, the preference link will be available from the right top menu even when you are not logged in. If you are not logged in and you access special:preferences, you will be given only one tab “Appearance” from the regular preferences. Here you can disable or enable hover cards.

Preference link for non logged in users Special:Preferences for non logged in users
 * How it will look

Vote for this approach

Access from hovercards As mentioned above, because we want to make it easy to disable/enable hovercards, we will retain the “settings” icon on each hovercard you see. Approach 1 and Approach 2 above are where this settings cog on each hovercard takes a user to disable the feature if the user wants to do so.

How it will look Hovercard settings from the card

We look forward to feedback from the community!