WMDE Technical Wishes/Footnote highlighting

Highlighting letters in footnote links in case of multi-referencing

The wish

• When a reference is pointed to multiple times, once you jump to the references section, you don’t know which letter will bring you back to where you came from. Example: Footnote 2 in the article "Pfullendorf" on dewiki.
• A solution could be to highlight the letter in the footnote links that will bring you back to your original reading position.

Research

This wish was discussed with several editors on Wikimania 2018. It was found to be uncontroversial. Some suggestions for the highlighting were made:
Scenario: "Letter "d" brings me back to the position in the text where I clicked on the footnote."

1	Place the arrow directly in front of the letter	a b c ↑d e f g  Siegfried Volk (siv): Pfullendorf. Geschichtsträchtige Industriestadt
2	Capital letter	↑ a b c D e f g  Siegfried Volk (siv): Pfullendorf. Geschichtsträchtige Industriestadt
3	background color	↑ a b c  d  e f g  Siegfried Volk (siv): Pfullendorf. Geschichtsträchtige Industriestadt
4	bold	↑ a b c d e f g  Siegfried Volk (siv): Pfullendorf. Geschichtsträchtige Industriestadt

Implementation

Example from German Wikipedia: Both clicking on the a and on the arrow takes you back to your previous reading position.
Please note that the footnote numbering (a, b) and the jump mark (arrow) may be different in your wiki.

• If you have jumped to a footnote that's referenced multiple times and want to jump back to your previous reading position,
  • you can click on the arrow at the beginning of the footnote (in some wikis, like enwiki, it's a caret ^). This wasn’t clickable before. The tooltip now says "Jump back up".
  • you can click on the superscript jump mark (e.g. ^a ) in the footnote. The one leading you back to your original position is highlighted bold.
• Scrolling back up, the highlighting persists.
• There can always be just one highlighted jump mark per page.
• Screen readers are supported with aria codes.

Limitations

• The highlighting of superscript jump mark doesn’t work for wikis where these jump marks are bold by default, e.g. enwiki. If those wikis want to have highlighted jump marks, they would need to change their default style for them to regular.
• In frwiki, the arrow at the beginning of the footnote currently doesn't work. (T210508)

Status

Deployment dates:

• Y mediawiki.org (group 0): 2018-11-27
• Y non-Wikipedia wikis, incl. meta.wikimedia.org: 2018-11-28
• Y Wikipedias: 2018-11-29

Links

• The task on Phabricator: T194511

Feedback

As always, feedback is very welcome. The best place for it is this talk page.