Wikipedia has added a ‘Page Previews’ feature for the desktop.
Wikipedia has added a ‘Page Previews’ feature for the desktop. Through the new feature, users can get previews of related topics, from hyperlinks present across its pages. With a pop-up that gives a preview of basic information, users can navigate through the website more efficiently. The feature was first spotted by The Verge.
Users can now hover over different hyperlinks that show up on any Wikipedia page. Once the cursor is positioned over a particular link, the pop-up shows an image and some basic information from its page in a split-screen format. If a user clicks on the pop-up, it leads to the previewed page. The pop-up disappears, though, if the cursor is removed from the link.
“We hope this change will lead to a Wikipedia that is easier to explore”, and perhaps even easier to learn from. We expect to iterations and more improvements to the feature and the desktop experience more broadly to come. In other words, we’re pretty excited about this,” said, Olga Vasileva, Product Manager, Reading Product Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedia also revealed that the Page Previews feature was rolled out in English and German this month. Trials had been started in 2017 itself, and the test languages also included Catalan, Italian, Greek, Hungarian and Russian. Introduced in 2014 as a beta feature called HoverCards, it was aimed to answer user needs, who demanded browser extensions and Navigation pop-ups, in a bid to eliminate visits to multiple pages.