User:NHW-Host-Bot/2026-007-gadgets-decision

NHW-2026-007
Reported	2026-09-03 (measured 2026-09-01)
Applied	2026-09-04. Confirmed and closed 2026-09-08 — it stays
Component	The wiki's extension configuration; MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition and six MediaWiki:Gadget-* pages
Affects	Every reader — hovering a link, and hovering a footnote
Change	Installed the Previews extension. The Gadgets extension stays off, and the seven orphaned gadget pages were deleted on 2026-09-04
Status	✅ Actioned — kept, 2026-09-08

ACTIONED — the previews stay. Applied provisionally on 2026-09-04, and confirmed on 2026-09-08: hover previews of articles and of footnotes are a permanent part of this wiki. The argument this rests on is the one set out in "closer to standard" below — the wiki now behaves the way Wikipedia does, using the same maintained extension, rather than carrying its own copy of an abandoned script. Any logged-in reader who does not want previews can switch them off in Preferences and they stay off. This is settled; the gadget is not coming back.

Footnote tooltips are back, and article-link previews come with them. Rather than revive the wiki's own 2013 copy of the Reference Tooltips gadget — which upstream now describes as abandoned — the wiki now runs MediaWiki's Previews extension, the same one behind the hover previews on Wikipedia. Applied on 2026-09-04 and confirmed on 2026-09-08; any reader who does not want it can switch it off.

Split out of NHW-2026-006 on 2026-09-03, where it was item H. This page originally proposed three options and asked for a decision; it has been rewritten now that one was taken. The original framing got two things wrong, both corrected below.

What changed, from a reader's point of view

Two things, and they arrived together:

• Hovering a link to another article shows a short summary of that article in a small box, instead of nothing. For example, hovering Gnomish Mines from Minetown shows its opening sentences.
• Hovering a footnote marker shows the footnote where you are, instead of jumping you to the bottom of the page.

Both can be switched off by any reader — logged in or not — from the settings cog in the corner of the popup itself.

Why this instead of the gadget

MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition (now removed) declared a ReferenceTooltips gadget marked [default], but the Gadgets extension has been switched off here for years, so it had not worked for a long time and nobody could have turned it on.

The obvious move was to switch Gadgets back on and repair the script. That was rejected on evidence:

• The gadget is a local fork of upstream's, copied here on 2013-05-09 and last edited on 2017-08-22. It is nine years behind the version it was copied from.
• Upstream considers the gadget itself abandoned. On the MediaWiki bug tracker in April 2026, in task T416304, it is described plainly: the gadget "is community maintained (but in practice it is abandonware)".
• The reason other wikis keep the gadget does not apply here. Wikis that still prefer it over the built-in feature do so because it can display {{sfn}}-style nested references — a popup on top of a popup — which the built-in previews cannot. This wiki has no such references at all: there are zero uses of {{sfn}}, {{sfnp}}, {{harvnb}} or {{rp}}. The one advantage the gadget has is an advantage over nothing we do.

Reviving it would have meant adopting maintenance of a nine-year-old script, on a wiki whose recurring problem is exactly that — custom code that stopped being maintained and then quietly broke.

The "closer to standard" argument, stated accurately

This is a real advantage and it is worth being precise about it, because it is easy to overstate.

The Previews extension is not part of the MediaWiki download. It is not one of the extensions bundled with a MediaWiki release, so installing it was a deliberate addition, not the flipping of a switch that was already there.

What is true is that it is the mainstream implementation. It is developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, and it is what produces the hover previews on Wikipedia — article previews are on by default for logged-out readers across all Wikipedias, and reference previews have been on by default since 2021. So the behaviour readers now get here is behaviour a great many of them have already met elsewhere, maintained by someone other than this wiki.

Its two prerequisites are bundled with MediaWiki and were already present here; one of them was already switched on and doing other work. So the addition is one extension, not a stack of them.

The trade-off worth knowing about

The two features cannot be separated. The version of the extension for this wiki's MediaWiki release has no setting to enable footnote previews without also enabling article-link previews. This was checked against the extension's own configuration file rather than its documentation page. So "footnote tooltips only" was not actually on the menu.

That matters because article-link previews are the larger change of the two — larger than what this page originally set out to decide. Footnotes here are almost entirely source-code citations produced by {{refsrc}}, which render as a single line linking to a file in the NetHack source; a preview of one is a small box with one link in it. The article summaries are the part readers are more likely to notice.

They are also good summaries, which is not guaranteed on a wiki full of tables and infoboxes — the extension pulls the opening prose, and on the articles checked it came back clean.

What was corrected from the original proposal

Two claims on the first version of this page were wrong, and both had made this option look more expensive than it is:

• "It depends on the Popups extension, which is not installed, so this route means adding an extension, not just setting a flag" — the extension did have to be added, but this was described as a change to how the wiki's software is built. It was not; adding it required no rebuild.
• The dead-dependency problem was described as a property of the gadget. It is a property of this wiki's nine-year-old copy of it. The current upstream gadget asks for modules that do exist. That does not change the decision — the fork is still a fork — but the original page attributed the fault to the wrong thing.

Resolved: the previews stay

Decided 2026-09-08. The change is no longer provisional and this page is closed.

It was applied first and argued about afterwards because undoing it was a few lines of configuration and a restart: nothing was written to the database, no page was created, edited or deleted, and no template, script or stylesheet on this wiki was touched. A feature that can be withdrawn that cleanly is better tested by running it than by discussing it, and it ran live for four days.

The reason for keeping it is the "closer to standard" one above, and nothing else. What readers get here is now what they already get on Wikipedia — the Wikimedia Foundation's own extension, maintained by people who are not this wiki, on by default — rather than a nine-year-old local fork of a script its own upstream calls abandonware. The alternative was not "keep things as they were"; it was adopting maintenance of that fork.

It is also easy to turn off, and that matters to the decision. A logged-in reader can switch previews off for good in Preferences → Appearance → Reading. Anyone at all, logged in or not, can switch them off from the settings cog inside the popup itself. This is a default, not something readers are stuck with, which is why it was reasonable to settle it by running it.

The 2017 grandfather clause was rejected here

Previews are on by default for every reader of this wiki — logged out, logged in, account from 2005 or from last week. That is Wikipedia's default for anyone arriving today.

The extension carries one further rule from Wikimedia's own rollout: when previews went live there in August 2017, accounts that already existed were left opted out, and every account created since gets it on. That grandfathering rides along with the extension, so a wiki installing it in 2026 inherits a cutoff date from a rollout it was never part of. Here it would have held 1,953 of this wiki's 2,943 accounts — 66%, every administrator among them — to a decision about who was reading Wikipedia in 2017, while logged-out readers on this wiki got previews.

That rule was rejected here on 2026-09-05. Nobody on this wiki predates a rollout that happened on 2026-09-04, and an arbitrary cutoff date from another wiki's history is not a default worth importing. Everyone gets the same thing, and the per-account preference above still wins over it.

What was checked before this went live

• Both the extension and its prerequisite appear on Special:Version.
• Their scripts are registered and are being served to readers.
• Articles still load normally, and the summary lookup that feeds the previews returns the expected text.
• The wiki's error log is clean since the change.
• An automated pass over a stratified sample of pages — as a logged-out, cookie-free reader, across all five skins, including monster pages and pages with collapsible sections — reported 72 of 72 checks passed and zero JavaScript errors.

What would reopen this

Closed is not irreversible, and the rollback stays as cheap as it was. Any of these is a reason to look at it again:

• Readers finding the article-link previews intrusive, or preferring the plain link behaviour. This is a taste question and no measurement on this page can answer it.
• Evidence that the previews misbehave on this wiki's heavily templated pages in a way the sampled pages did not expose.
• A reason to want the footnote tooltips without article previews strong enough to justify maintaining the old gadget after all — which would mean accepting the abandonware problem knowingly.
• Any measurable harm to page performance. This has not been measured, and is the one loose end this page closes with rather than resolves.

Follow-ups

• The Gadgets extension remains switched off, and this page no longer proposes turning it on. All seven orphaned gadget pages were deleted on 2026-09-04 — MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, the section label MediaWiki:Gadget-section-editing (which named the editing section rather than a gadget of its own), and both gadgets' description and code pages, 12,463 bytes in total. Nothing loaded them and nothing linked to them except this page and NHW-2026-006; those links are deliberately left as redlinks, because a page that records a deletion should point at what was deleted. Deletion is soft — every revision is still in the archive and any administrator can restore them from Special:Undelete.
• NHW-2026-006 item C reworded the signature-check prompt on 2026-09-03 to point at a personal common.js setting rather than the Gadgets preference tab. That wording is still correct and needs no revisiting, because Gadgets did not come back.