Have you ever quickly looked up an article on Wikipedia, gotten all caught up in the fun of reading, then suddenly realized that three hours had passed and you’re now reading a series of articles about totally different topics? The folks at xkcd certainly have. And now, we’ve got just the feature for you.
Hovercards provides the casual reader with a streamlined browsing experience. Whenever you hover over a link to another article, a short summary of the article and a relevant image is provided to you so you can make the decision about whether you want to read the full article. And, as of today, the feature is live for testing as a Beta Feature on all Wikimedia wikis.
Inspired by the Navigation Popups (NavPopups) gadget used by many of our experienced editors, Hovercards take the idea of NavPopups and modifies it to be suitable to casual readers. The design is minimalistic, presenting only the information which interests casual readers: the lead paragraph and first image of the article they’re interested in browsing to.
To enable Hovercards, simply log in, click the “Beta” link at the top right of your page and tick the box next to Hovercards. As its placement in the Beta tab suggests, the feature is still under active development, so we’d appreciate any feedback you have. You can give us feedback by writing on the talk page of the feature.
We hope you like using Hovercards!
Vibha Bamba, Dan Garry, Prateek Saxena, Nick Wilson
Wikimedia Foundation
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