Congrats! So much study, work blog posts, design, and just thought and care
went into this feature. A huge day for readers of desktop English and
German. As the old saying goes: w00t w00t web team!
On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 2:26 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
A huge congratulations on this awesome project! I know
it's been a slog,
but hopefully worth the pain :) Nice work, everyone involved!
On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 2:11 PM, Olga Vasileva <ovasileva(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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_164#Improvements_to_Page_Previews
[3]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fragen_zur_
Wikipedia/Archiv/2018/Woche_14#Seitenvorschaubilder_(Page_Previews)
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(
miscellaneous)#Next_Steps
[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-page-previews-for-wikipedia-
and-what-could-be-done-with-them-in-the-future-7a5fa6b07b96
[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/
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