I personally do not care for the link preview feature as I am one of those people who like to hover over a link so I can see the url leads (which is also why I detest URL shorteners).
I also have to wonder how much bandwidth Wikipedia is going to end up using to display unneeded previews.
> I personally do not care for the link preview feature as I am one of those people who like to hover over a link so I can see the url leads
But that's exactly what these preview popups are for! A bit heavier than the plain URL, but much more useful and friendlier.
(EDIT: I see there's a bug in that it displays the preview even if you don't stop the mouse there. Still, this can be lighter than requiring people to click through to the full articles, considering the preview can tell you what you need or that the link is not relevant for you, and slows you going down the rabbit hole to more links. Maybe it should be located at the bottom of the screen like the plain URL popup though?)
> I also have to wonder how much bandwidth Wikipedia is going to end up using to display unneeded previews.
This is interesting. There's an external arrow for external links, so I'm still good with this use case for inspecting links; for internal links I've found myself hovering where I previously clicked (and loaded) an additional page at least 50% of the time. Where I'm OK with a quick paragraph description and can then decide if the linked paragraph requires / inspires a deeper read, about 50% of the time.
I think this is a net reduction of bandwidth for my personal use-case. Wide A/B testing would reveal more, obviously.
I also have to wonder how much bandwidth Wikipedia is going to end up using to display unneeded previews.
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