Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/References/Reference Previews

Ten percent

I like the idea — it has often been frustrating not to be able to jump back to the article text once the view has scrolled down to the list of references. I am, however, unsure whether including only 10% of readers in an A/B test on small wikis will provide enough data for meaningful conclusions. I recall previous discussions suggesting that only about 1% of readers reach the References section (for whichever reason). This could end up being 10% of 1% of 30% (desktop) of ... pon_or (talk) 14:00, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion! We are aware of the issue, the average reader's interaction rate with references is indeed low, even on large wikis. That's why we want to include multiple large wikis (e.g. dewiki, frwiki) in our experiment to make sure we get enough data – but even medium-sized wikis like hrwiki have a high enough number of desktop readers to hopefully allow us getting meaningful insights from a diverse group of wikis. 10% is the maximum defined by Test Kitchen when conducting an experiment with the identifier type we need ("edge-unique"). Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 14:35, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Proposed version when hovering over the Reference Preview

Hi. Do I understand the image correctly that some options will be presented when clicking anywhere on the reference? That seems problematic to me. What if there are links in the reference?

And also, isn't that a bit too magical (unexpected)? I mean, it feels wrong to have settings as the main action of this popup. Nux (talk) 23:36, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

hover version (unchanged)

persistent version – only appears when clicking on the footnote marker

Thanks for your feedback @Nux! We've discussed your question about this option potentially being a bit unexpected. We are considering a simplified approach, where we basically don't change the hover-version of Reference Previews and only show the persistent version when a user clicks on the footnote marker, not when they click on any content in the hovered Reference Preview. That would already give us valuable insights during the experiment on how readers interact with it. What do you think? Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 16:43, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

How does the hover option even work on mobile devices, tablets? I think you should have the same behavior for the popup since it's not much of a difference - a link in the already existing line. pon_or (talk) 11:04, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Reference pop-up (Minerva skin)

@Ponor both the mobile skin (Minerva) and and the mobile app use a different reference pop-up (which of course only works when clicking on a footnote). We are not touching those, the proposed improvements focus on the desktop view.

I'll check with our team to make sure there are no issues for editors on mobile devices using desktop skins like Vector 2022. Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 13:13, 3 March 2026 (UTC)