Hello,

A new feature called Reference Previews [1] was introduced as a beta feature last year. After more than a year of testing, bug fixing and other improvements it will soon leave the beta state in the first wikis, enabling it by default for all users including readers. New features like this are deployed in multiple batches, to ensure everything runs smoothly. Therefore, we are currently looking for a few small or medium-sized wikis that are interested in being among the first to gain the new feature.

If your community is interested, please reach out to me on my discussion page or via email.

The feature shows you references in a small popup when you hover over the reference number in square brackets. This way you can look up a reference without jumping down to the bottom of the page. The feature is part of the MediaWiki Popups extension [2], which is also used for the Page Previews feature [3]. Both features can be turned on and off together by the user.

Several wikis have a gadget called “RefTooltips” to provide the same functionality [4]. The new extension will disable itself if RefTooltips is used. This way, it is up to the users and communities to decide if they want to disable the gadget in favor of the new feature.

Reference Previews originated from a wish from the German-speaking wiki community and was developed collaboratively by Wikimedia Deutschland the Wikimedia Foundation. If you'd like to know more about this feature, please visit the project page.[1]

For the Technical Wishes team,

Michael Schönitzer

1: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/ReferencePreviews

2: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Extension:Popups

3: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews

4: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234204#6244041