About

Lukas Mathis has a neat script on his blog, ignore the code, where the footnotes for his posts are displayed in little floating divs when you hover over the corresponding numbered superscripts. The first thing I thought when I saw this, was, this would be pretty useful for Wikipedia articles, where there are usually tons of citations and references.


So I adapted the bookmarklet for Wikipedia. Now you probably wouldn’t want to load the bookmarklet for every Wikipedia page, especially if you really do read the citations often. So I’ve also modified the script for use with Greasemonkey.Once you've got the bookmarklet or Greasemonkey script up and running, this is what you should see:

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How Do I Use It?

These scripts work for any Wikipedia article (the Greasemonkey script runs for URLs of the form http://*.wikipedia.org/wiki/* (and now for https://*.wikimedia.org/* also)).

Bookmarklet

To use the bookmarklet, all you'd usually need to do is copy the target of a link with the JavaScript code. Unfortunately, Google Sites strips all the code so you'll need to download the code as a file (wikipediafootnotepopup.bookmarklet.js). To use it, create a new bookmark, and for the URL, copy and and paste the code from the file you downloaded. When you're on a Wikipedia article, just select the bookmark you created with the JavaScript code.

Note

The bookmarklet will NOT work in IE8 which handles events in a non-standard way. So far I've only tested it with Firefox 3.6.3 and Chrome 4.1.

Greasemonkey Script

To use the Greasemonkey script with Firefox, you'll need to install the Greasemonkey extension; Chrome 4 supports Greasemonkey scripts natively. Once you've done that, download the script (wikipediafootnotepop.user.js) from this page and add it as a new script in Greasemonkey. Unfortunately, it seems that Greasemonkey doesn't detect this as a Greasemonkey script and so, doesn't present the installation dialog. So you may want to try installing it from userscripts.org.

Once the script is installed, you'll need to refresh any Wikipedia articles you may already have open, but other than that, it will load automatically and you should get the behaviour shown above.

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Download

• The Greasemonkey script (wikipediafootnotepopup.user.js) is attached to this page. Or you may get it from userscripts.org
  
• The bookmarklet (wikipediafootnotepopup.bookmarklet.js) is also attached.