Talk:Page Previews/2019

Page Previews solves the core problem of users opening multiple tabs to gain an understanding of a word in the context of the subject they are reading. Whenever a reader hovers over a link to another article, a short summary of the subject, including its graphical image, is provided to them so they can decide whether they need to visit that subject more fully before continuing the current subject.

Please give us feedback on your experience using this feature so we can change and improve it. Each language is welcome in this discussion!

You can read more about the feature here.

Known Issues

• All issues with potential work attached to them tracked here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/765/

Preview image selected on Wikivoyage

Can the logic of which image is selected be controlled? What is the current logic for preview image selection? In English Wikivoyage it is taking the first image given in a listing template. This may be the first point of interest in the See section but more often than not will be the airport or train station in the Get in section, or even the tourist information office in Understand section. Would be better if it used the first image on the page or the Wikidata image, or even cropped version of the page banned. To see example go to region pages for Ohrid or Frankfurt. Traveler100 (talk) 07:11, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

It uses whatever Extension:PageImages gives it. 197.218.85.186 (talk) 07:24, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

A way of permanently disabling Page Preview?

It keeps coming back and I don't want it!

Why not provide a way of permanently turning this annoyance off?

1. I dont want to turn off Java. Why should I have to?
2. It's got nothing to do with the cache or browser settings etc.. The damned thing just keeps resetting itself!
   2.68.15.75 (talk) 11:03, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

If you disable it, the setting should be kept in your browser's local storage. (screenshot). If you're using a private window, or if you're clearing your browser's local storage (perhaps via a privacy-extension), it will reset. Otherwise it should be permanent.

If it's not working for you, and you don't match either of those circumstances, please tell us what browser & operating system (win/mac/etc) you are using, list any privacy-related browser-extensions you use, and if possible explain how you can reliably reproduce the bug (i.e. what steps you follow after which it spontaneously resets). Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:43, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

You're correct, you shouldn't have to turn off javascript. The state of the setting should be stored in your browser. Which wiki are you having issues with in particular? [edit: I didn't see the reply by @Quiddity (WMF)] CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

This was just brought up again on w:en:Talk:Main page - how can a wiki change the default for non-logged-in users? (I'm not saying enwiki will, there has been no discussion of it, but how would it be done? I couldn't find anything in the site javascript that controls this) Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 22:12, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Page Previews for the Wikipedia: namespace?

I love this feature. Are there any plans to allow wikis to extend the functionality to articles outside the main namespace? I'm thinking particularly of the Wikipedia namespace on Wikipedia. When reading documents on Wikipedia policy, I often encounter "the core problem of users needing to open multiple tabs to gain an understanding of a word or concept within the context of the subject they are reading" - i.e. that issue that Page Previews so effectively solves in the main namespace. A preview would be especially helpful for the common case where a link uses a non-obvious shortcut, e.g. WP:WPEDIT because WP:GLC therefore WP:PSCI and WP:AWW... Colin M (talk) 15:44, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

Hm, I think this would be up to the community to decide. If a project decided this was something they wanted the we could discuss the application. CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Suggestion: End Preview Text At End Of Sentence

IMHO, a much-needed improvement to the Page Preview feature would be to have it end at a complete sentence instead of at an arbitrary word limit. Here's an example for the entry Uffizi :

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited, it is also one of the largest and best known in the world and holds a collection of priceless

This preview text would be so much better if it included the full sentence, like so:

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited, it is also one of the largest and best known in the world and holds a collection of priceless works, particularly from the period of the Italian Renaissance.

Could you please pass on this suggestion to the developers? Thanks. 182.57.86.135 (talk) 15:28, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

That sounds like a nice idea when you assume that you will be gaining the end of the sentence. However in reality there's going to be a maximum preview text length, which essentially changes this into a proposal to drop the first half of any sentence that would be incomplete. When viewed that way, displaying the partial sentence is almost surely preferable to not displaying it. Alsee (talk) 19:57, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I agree with your assessment of the issue, and I had thought about it too. The reason I still believe it's an issue though is because I observed that a large part of the time, the incomplete sentence actually caused me to open the link in a new tab to see what the next word was, thus defeating the very purpose of the preview. If many other users have also experienced this same behaviour, it might be worth fixing it.

To explain better, considering the example provided in my original comment, the preview ends with "holds a collection of priceless", which immediately begs the question: priceless what? Whereas, using the rule of only including complete sentences but not crossing the word limit, the preview would reduce to:

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy.

IMHO, this brief extract fully serves the function of a link preview, without the added "discomfort" of having a broken sentence. An ideal compromise might be to add a setting to "Include full sentences only" in the page preview preferences, but I'm guessing this might unnecessarily complicate matters.

Essentially, I suppose it boils down to seeing which option more users prefer: a shorter but complete paragraph, or a longer but broken one? 182.57.75.4 (talk) 12:12, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Completely agree. I've been using the link preview gadget for years, and I don't recall this being an issue there.

With this new implementation we get cut off in the middle of the sentence, with the text just fading out. The reaction is to try and scroll or to try and find the 'expand' link that will complete the sentence - basically to try and get the rest of the sentence to appear. As per previous poster, this kind of defeats the point of the preview, if you need to click through to finish the sentence.

I really appreciate the design work that has gone into this, but it nevertheless feels like a step backwards, due to this issue. Looks pretty, works less well.

Please take a look at what the previous gadget did, because that worked well. HappyDog (talk) 23:15, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Vandalized Page Previews - how to revert or edit?

Hi,

I'm not sure where Page Previews pull their content from - I've found one this morning that differs wildly from the article it links. On the 2017 Honduras General Election page (link A, below), under the Supranational bodies header, when you hover over "Organization of American States", the preview text reads:

The Organization of American States, or the OAS or OEA, is a continental organization that serves to control American puppet states in the Americas. Headquartered in the United States capital Washington, D.C., the OAS's members are the 35 independent states of the Americas.

This is not an objective or factual statement, and differs wildly from the article that the OAS link leads to. The word "puppet" appears nowhere in the article source - which was where I went first in my attempt to find and revert the vandalism.

The previews feature is great, but I really hope that it is refined so that vandalism is easier to revert/address in the future.

A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Honduran_general_election#Supranational_bodies B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_American_States 143.85.163.18 (talk) 15:12, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

The article was vandalized 23:21, 1 June 2019. The vandalism was fixed within one minute.

For some reason the vandalized version remained as the active version in the page-preview cache for over 17 hours. I preformed a purge on the affected page which successfully cleared out the vandalism.

I'm not an expert on the caching, but one of the devs might want to look into why a few seconds of vandalism got stuck in the cache for so long. Is it possible the two edits were asynchronously processed in the wrong order? It would be bad if the software didn't spot something like that. A swift revert like this tends to be a significant red flag for blatant vandalism.

P.S. 143.85.163.1 thanks for the report. Any edit to Organization of American States would have fixed it. It can also be fixed by purging the page, adding ?action=purge at the end of the OAS address and loading it. Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_American_States?action=purge Alsee (talk) 17:15, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

This problem still exists. The preview for Angolan Civil War is vandalized, but I cannot find the text anywhere in the article. It's really aggravating. Louisiana22 (talk) 03:18, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

This is currently a problem on [[wikipedia:Gateway Arch]]. Vandalism was rolled back within a minute, but the irrelevant first image is still showing up in the page preview. I wasn't sure how/where to report this? (sorry, unsure of how to link to a particular page from in here) Cleancutkid (talk) 02:34, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Can't see the Page Preview enable/disable button in Appareance

...simply does not exist the Reading Section in my Special:Preferences under Appearance tab.

This is my configuration:

Product	Version
MediaWiki	1.32.0
PHP	7.2.17-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 (apache2handler)
MariaDB	10.1.38-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.18.04.1
ICU	60.2
Elasticsearch	5.6.16
Lua	5.1.5

These are my available/enabled Skins:

Skin	Version	License	Description	Authors
Metrolook	6.0 (930bc3c)13:56, 17 December 2016	GPL-2.0-or-later	ENABLED	immewnity, Paladox, Craig Davison and lagleki
MinervaNeue	– (e1c3fb6)15:00, 16 October 2018	GPL-2.0-or-later	A responsive mobile first skin	Readers Web Team, Bahodir Mansurov, Joaquin Hernandez, Jon Robson, Juliusz Gonera, Ryan Kaldari, Florian Schmidt and Sam Smith
MonoBook	–	GPL-2.0-or-later	The classic MediaWiki skin since 2004, named after the black-and-white photo of a book in the page background	Gabriel Wicke, Isarra Yos and others
Timeless	0.8.1	GPL-2.0-or-later	A timeless skin designed after the Winter prototype by Brandon Harris, and various styles by the Wikimedia Foundation	Isarra Yos
Vector	–	GPL-2.0-or-later	Modern version of MonoBook with fresh look and many usability improvements	Trevor Parscal, Roan Kattouw and others

What's wrong?

Thanks. Silkwood (talk) 16:12, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

Parentheses as part of title

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but what about article titles which contain parentheses that actually are part of the name of the subject? The page preview seems to work with chemical elements that have parentheses in the title, but looking at the preview for Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) leaves out the remainder of the song title which is in parentheses. 2600:1008:B150:2F09:E0B5:7116:DB1C:3DF0 (talk) 05:45, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I think this has been discussed previously but I'm not sure what the current thoughts are on it. I've opened a ticket for discussion with the maintainers: T226323. Niedzielski (talk) 22:57, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Currently anything in parentheses is hidden in the preview, but I think anything in bold should be shown. W.andrea (talk) 21:27, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

This could be implemented generally as a LocalSettings variable containing a list of terms, which when found within the text of a page, cause the parenthetical stripping to be disabled. Another solution is to have a LocalSettings variable containing a RegEx for parenthetical text that should be included in Page Preview. ~~~~

Another user case where this is a major problem is with Bios. The subject's DOB and DD are usually within parentheses immediately following their name. e.g., John Doe (26 BCE - January 1, 1955). When I come across an unfamiliar name while reading WP, I almost always need to know the time period when the person lived (and most of time that's all I need to know about them), however, Page Preview doesn't show the dates. Maybe when fixing the other parentheses issues you could fix this too (or make sure the fix addresses this user case. ~ Sparkie82 (talk) 01:21, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Page preview feature requirements?

Hi, are there any requirements (in size and dimensions) for images to be visible with page preview feature? I have updated logo of one page, but image is still not visible in page preview, only text, like before. EchoBlu (talk) 08:49, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi, the image is selected by Extension:PageImages and its default selection criteria are documented in the section Image choice. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 12:05, 30 December 2019 (UTC)