Wikipedia's 'page previews' feature, which shows a preview when hovering over links, recently launched across hundreds of language editions and receives up to half a million hits per minute. The development faced significant challenges including automatic thumbnail selection, generating accurate summaries, prioritizing HTML elements, and scaling the API for high traffic. This initiative required extensive work with community feedback, privacy considerations, and iterative design and testing. The feature is intended to enhance user experience significantly, involving substantial collaboration across multiple teams in Wikimedia Foundation.
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Why it took a long time to build that tiny link preview on WikipediaWe had to choose a thumbnailWe had to generate a summaryWe work with our communityDesign design designWe had to instrument itWe had to scale our API to support youThank you thank you thank youSort: