[Wikitech-l] Page previews promoted out of beta on all Wikipedias

Hi all, Page previews[1] have now been promoted out of beta to the remaining two Wikipedias - English and German, after a series of consultations on both wikis [2][3][4]. The feature is now on by default for all logged-out users and off by default for all logged-in users (can be enabled using user preferences) on all Wikipedias. Further changes to configuration based on our conversations with communities (such as turning the feature on for new accounts) are coming up soon. Page previews allows readers to read an excerpt of a linked article’s lead section without leaving the page they’re currently on, by hovering their mouse over the link. It has been activated by default for logged-out users on all Wikipedias except German and English since August 2017, and numerous further bug fixes and technical improvements have been implemented since. A few weeks ago we published the results of our latest round of A/B testing [5]. We found that when the feature is enabled, readers will open pages in their browser slightly less often (a decrease of around 3–5% in regular pageviews). But on the other hand, they interact with a lot more different pages when one counts both the seen page previews and the regular pageviews (an increase of around 20–22% in the number of distinct pages interacted with via either method). In addition, the option to deactivate the feature was used very rarely (disable rates were around 0.01%). This leads us to believe that Page Previews is a welcomed feature that is helping readers learn more during their visits. More information about Page previews can be found on the project page on MediaWIki.org [1]. The team also recently wrote a few blog posts. One about the work that went into the design of the feature [6] and another giving an overview of the functionality [7]. If you see any issues, please report them in Phabricator. [8] Thanks, Olga [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_16… [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fragen_zur_Wikipedia/Archiv/2018/Wo… [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Next_S… [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews/2017-18_A/B_Tests [6] https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/how-we-designed-… [7] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/04/17/wikipedia-page-previews/ [8] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/page-previews/ -- Olga Vasileva // Product Manager // Reading Web Team https://wikimediafoundation.org/