// sorry for cross-posting

Hello,

readers of an article who want to check the article’s citation have to jump down to the reference section – and that is disturbing their reading flow. Hence, it was a top wish[1] from the German Wikipedia community to have previews of references inside the article text.

That’s what the Reference Previews feature does: When you hover over a footnote marker or click on it, you’ll see a little pop-up with the content of the reference. This pop-up is similar to the Page Previews[2] pop-ups, which show previews of linked articles. Reference Previews are also influenced by the Reference Tooltips gadget, which is used in several Wikipedias. Additionally, Reference Previews indicate the type of a reference, which is meant to help readers assess quickly if they consider the cited source trustworthy. First tests have confirmed this to be helpful.

Reference Previews are being developed by Wikimedia Germany’s Technical Wishes[3] team, with technical support from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Reading Web[4] team. The design for this feature is being done by the WMF.

Now, a very first version of Reference Previews will be available as a beta feature on German and Arabic Wikipedia. The deployment is planned for Thursday, April 4. If you want to test it, please have a look at the information for activating the beta feature.[5]  Feedback is very welcome on the central talk page![6]

If you want to try Reference Previews at an early stage on your wiki, please let us know on the central talk page.[6]

More information about the wish and the feature can be found on the project page.[7]

Best,

Johanna for the Technical Wishes team

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

[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes

[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web

[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/ReferencePreviews#Try_the_beta_feature

[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help_talk:Reference_Previews