Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Bots and gadgets/Improve the information returned on hovering links from the references section

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Improve the information returned on hovering links from the references section
  • Problem: When hovering over links from the references section that return to a citation's inline anchor, the text previewed is always a snippet from the article's lead, regardless of where the reference is anchored inline. It would be better if the snippet displayed text that the reference was inline to support instead.
  • Who would benefit: Both editors and readers would benefit from the increased functionality (when verifying an article's content) and Wikipedia would benefit, as well, as her stature, as a trusted tertiary source, began to increase.
  • Proposed solution: Instead of displaying a snippet of the article's lead, return a prescribed block of text immediately preceding the reference's inline anchor where the cursor returns.
  • More comments: I believe that this can be done without a great deal of technical difficulty.
  • Phabricator tickets: I am not aware of any such "Phabricator tickets".
  • Proposer:--John Cline (talk) 19:18, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

This is a pretty hard problem to solve, as the gadget Navigation Popups uses its own wikitext parser from 2005. it also has no idea how to parse from arbitrary starting points and the whole gadget is very hard to adapt as its very old code. oh and this is a gadget, so it is not available to ppl withou an account.—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:51, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for sharing these important considerations. I need to disclaim any notions of technical prowess on my part — this is truly a wish from me, and not a suggestion.
Being lay, I did not mention a few things (for not knowing the lingo, or the ropes) but I do remember that our developers released an enhancement similar to pop-ups, but editors could only use one or the other, not both. Before wishing this, I did disable pop-ups, and evaluate the version developed in house. It would be that version where I hold my best hope of seeing it come to pass. I thought that I heard it called "reference tooltips", or "h-cards", but don't really know. Nevertheless, when hovering with pop-ups disabled, our software engine produces similar information when hovering from the inline anchor, but it produces no output from the reference side. I understand that pop-ups is difficult to maintain, but hope our in house team can do something with our version. If this is a technical impossibility, like trisecting angles with compass and straight edge, the proposal would best be withdrawn. I'll yield to the powers that be, to that end. Thank you again for your interest, and your reply.--John Cline (talk) 03:14, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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