Talk:Page Previews/2021

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/

Need a magic word to change default image

I've had two conversations on enwiki in the last few months where it has been desirable to change the image shown in a page preview to something that is not what the tool identifies as the first image in an article. For simplicity: imagine that we don't have an image of Actor X, but midway down their article we talk about their comedy duo work with Actor Y (pictured) and so Actor Y is shown in the Page Preview, clearly misleading as the person doesn't match the name. The only solutions are getting a picture of Actor X (could be literally impossible) or removing all images from the article (could be very undesirable). At least, those are the only solutions I'm aware of.

To me the obvious solution would be a magic word or something that we can encapsulate in a template so that I can write {{PagePreview|None}} to have no image in the page preview, and ideally I can also write {{PagePreview|Image.jpg}} to override the first image as preview and instead use Image.jpg.

It is hugely undesirable for the only solution to be changing the primary rendered article layout in order to accommodate for a secondary layout feature like Page Previews.

I'd be delighted, of course, if there is any other solution and I'm just not aware of it, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.

(Please ping me or do something that gives me a cross-wiki notification so I'll notice replies to this.) Bilorv (talk) 23:31, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

@Bilorv: another solution is only use the infobox image 1992 FARHAAD (talk) 23:49, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

@Bilorv, you said imagine that we don't have an image of Actor X, but midway down their article we talk about their comedy duo work with Actor Y (pictured) and so Actor Y is shown in the Page Preview. Please clarify whether you have actually seen this happen recently?

I discussed this exact issue with the developers, and I believe it was fixed abut five years ago. PageImage should only be grabbing images from the lead section. Ah... I found the Phab tasks to fix this. See T87336 on the issue, and fix-deployment in T152115. Alsee (talk) 06:27, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah sorry @Alsee, I didn't know it only grabs images from the lead. This was the reason I didn't want to add an image to an article but I didn't actually test it out and check. I guess that reduces the number of uses of this but there is still a more complex case on en:Pornhub where consensus is changing but there was a suggestion at one point that might reasonably have been the one with consensus where an infobox image identified as the first in the page (a screenshot of the website) would have been kept in the article, but suppressed from the Page Previews (so that no image would be shown, or possibly a custom-specified image). Possibly less contrived is en:Talk:2020 Labour Party leadership election (UK)#Main image where we would have liked to omit an image to avoid seeming to give preference to one candidate in a current election.

These each seem like a concrete use case which is impossible to implement at the moment. Or am I wrong on this too? Bilorv (talk) 19:46, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, displaying one candidate in election articles (and other cases) is a serious problem. It makes Wikipedia appear grossly biased, it affects a fairly significant number of articles, and it creates a severe dilemma for editors. I raised that issue around he same time (about 5 years ago), but it never got traction with the devs.

We definitely need some way to control, override, or exclude image selection, or to ensure images are not displayed unless the required multiple images are displayed side-by-side. In particular I'd say it needs to be some kind of fix or option we can add in a template, to address all new and open election articles at once.

I don't know if staff are still watching this page and active on this project. If someone from the Foundation doesn't pick up on this task soon, it might help to organized a community call to get this fixed. Alsee (talk) 21:49, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Here's an example how page preview can lead to problems: the article "Beg bugs" has a hyperlink in the lead for "Skin rashes" and if you hover over it with page preview on, it shows the image in the lead there. BUT that image of a skin rash looks nothing like the skin rash that bed bugs produce. So a person hovering over the link and scanning quickly might end up misinformed about bed bugs by assuming the image is apropos when it is not.

I do not know how this could be solved. Some possible avenues would be to extended the wikilink syntax to include other parameters (perhaps the best but would be a big change) or to wrap the link in a template that controls the page preview behavior (ugly solution). Jason Quinn (talk) 01:14, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn also yesterday I was reading w:en:The Ultimate Gift and hovered over "Ali Hillis" on its infobox, the only things you can see in the preview image is her chest and half of her face. 1992 FARHAAD (talk) 01:55, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Images

Which image do you see in a page preview? Anotherdelta (talk) 09:13, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Works when not signed in, but not when signed in

Took me forever to figure out why Previews worked at times, an other time not. Turns out that when I'm not signed in, Page Preview works. When I notice I'm not signed in, an do so, the Page Previews no longer work.

No changes in browser settings, extensions, etc. 2601:600:9D80:3F80:18F:D3A1:1D70:1F0 (talk) 00:34, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Check your preferences. Are page previews enabled there? {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 17:00, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Page previews were never mass enabled for pre existing users. So if you never manually enabled it, then you still need to enable in your Preferences. They are in the appearance section and then: Enable page previews.

Another reason can be that you have some sort of competing gadget or user script installed. Navigation popups for instance disables Page Previews. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 07:42, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

Many images missing in preview after upgrade to MW 1.35

chown -R www-data:www-data ....../mediawiki/images

Howdy,

we are using PageImages/TextExtracts/Popups for some years now and are more than just pleased. It always worked fine and I cannot imagine how to get along without it. Recently I upgraded our test wiki from MW 1.31.15 to 1.35.4. Unfortunately, as a result there are several images missing now in the page preview, while others are still there.

I am confused: When looking into the page props, the images are there in either case, whether the page preview does show an image or doesn't. So, if the page prop image is set, what could be the reason that an image is missing in the preview?

I found many examples where the image is not being displayed in the test wiki but (for the same articles) it is always displayed in our live wiki. Also, I have already run the rebuildLinks script, but as mentioned above the page prop images are correct anyway, with or without the script.

I should tell ... there is one low trick we exploit. We use links belonging to a separate namespace, which are simple redirects to the main namespace. But, again, the page prop images are all set, in every single case I examined. Nonetheless, some of them appear in the preview, some not. 2003:C2:3F22:8200:C1BD:F620:4468:F03 (talk) 10:31, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Found and solved! There was a problem with the user rights. Owner of all image files was "root"; changed to "www-data" (just like in the live wiki) and now the page previews work as expected.

(On the other hand: now I don't understand why several page previews _did_ work ... but honestly ... it's totally irrelevant now.) 2003:C2:3F22:8200:D1CD:FA3A:8FEF:9D5D (talk) 19:57, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Seeing missing images in Enable/Disable section

Page Previews#Enable/Disable

Do you have the same issue? Heading (talk) 03:25, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Fixed, someone messed with the spelling of the filenames —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 10:17, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Birth and death years

Hello, the feature currently removes the first parenthesis content. So the preview for the English-language Wikipedia article about France doesn't show "(French: République française)", which makes sense.

However, the preview for biographies doesn't show the birth and death years, which makes the preview a bit less practical. Can you do it?

I suggest you to retrieve the years from Wikidata, rather than parse the article's parenthesis.

Thanks! NaBUru38 (talk) 16:40, 17 December 2021 (UTC)