Last modified: 2014-05-03 11:12:39 UTC
There's a gadget that shows the description for a property or label when hovering over it. See http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.de/2013/08/wikidata-gadgets.html. This should be brought into Wikibase.
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-Descriptions.js
I would advise simply adding the descriptions to the links' titles in the HTML, like is already done in watchlists and recent changes, rather than having javascript retrieve the data using ajax calls to add it to a special tooltip.
Because the whole interface is built using javascript, it has to be done there. However, I do not understand all of the modules yet. May someone explain me where I might start searching for it? Then I will try this one.
I would strongly suggest to display the descriptions all the time and not on hover. Check out how Reasonator does it. Hover has the disadvantage that it does not work on devices without a mouse cursor, like tablets, readers, mobile devices, etc.
While this is true I do not want to add even more information/clutter in the UI while we're actively trying to reduce information overload. Wikidata is not well suited on mobile anyway at this point anyway. These use-cases should be looked at for the mobile skin. In addition it is not making the mobile/tablet experience worse than it is right now.
Hovercards are perfect for this. They are enabled as a beta feature now on Wikidata but are still pretty useless. We'll be working with the designers to make them more useful at the hackathon.
Hovercards are part and parcel of Reasonator.. It would be just a matter of using that functionality and you have something that works fine. Thanks, GerardM
