Engaging and reengaging Wikipedia readers – Diff

Engaging and reengaging Wikipedia readers – Diff
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For most of its history, Wikipedia didn’t have to worry about attracting readers. People searched for something, landed on Wikipedia, and accessed knowledge directly. Crucially, many of them became editors to keep the content reliable and high-quality.
But with the rise of AI chatbots and social media, the way people search for information has changed. Readers who in the past frequently visited Wikipedia are now turning to other platforms that provide convenient, personalized information, as well as more images and multimedia.
The percentage of the world that visits Wikipedia is decreasing, visible in the drop in the number of readers, and in turn, impacting the number of accounts created and contributions to our sites
. Everyone in the world should have access to trustworthy, reliable knowledge, and so we need to support the new ways people learn while maintaining the core of what has made Wikipedia so valuable for 25 years.
Human pageviews to all language versions of Wikipedia since September 2021, with revised pageviews since April 2025.
In a time where fewer people come to us via search engines, we want to ensure that when readers
do
come to Wikipedia, they find it immediately useful, memorable, and enjoyable. We want readers to remember Wikipedia from the first time they visit, so that they return to find opportunities to go deeper – actively participating and engaging in their learning experience, and growing into the daily readers, donors, and contributors of the future.
To do this, we will have to try out lots of things. Many of our ideas will fail. We will be experimenting often and quickly to figure out which of our ideas have potential and which need to be scrapped. We will share updates at every stage along the way and discuss next steps with communities. For a bird’s eye view of our work, every experiment we run will be documented at the
List of Experiments in Product and Technology page
on Metawiki.
This year, we began this type of rapid experimentation in earnest. The Foundation increased its investment into features for readers by setting up two new teams from the former Reader Web team:
Reader Growth
and
Reader Experience
. Along with the existing
Mobile Apps
teams, these new teams are experimenting with a variety of different approaches to support readers through their experience on Wikimedia projects. In this post, we will outline some of our ongoing and planned work for readers, all with the overall goal of supporting readers to visit and return to Wikipedia.
Discovering articles and images
These screenshots of the image browsing feature on mobile show the carousel experience as well as the more deep-dive zoom effect.
As pageviews decrease, we want to identify what parts of Wikipedia’s current structure could attract people to visit more often. This is especially important on mobile web, our most visited platform. A top request from readers, as found in
surveys of global internet users
, is for “more images/photos” on Wikipedia. Often, these images already exist on the wikis – either further down in the article, or somewhere on Wikimedia Commons. We have been experimenting with ways to increase the visibility of images in the reading experience. Over the past few months the Reader Growth team has been testing a sliding gallery view of all an article’s images at the top of the article. Readers can click into the gallery to get more context on a single image, or click the image to jump to that part of an article to see it within its original context. The
experiment
we ran also allowed readers to discover images for the same article across different Wikipedias. This is especially powerful for medium-sized and smaller wikis. Take the article about the city of Barcelona, for example: English Wikipedia has 65 images, Bulgarian has 41, Chinese has 14, and Kiswahili has just 2.
The sliding gallery clickthrough rate, which measures how often people engage with the feature, was 8.7% on English Wikipedia. This is quite high – typical web clickthrough rates are between 1–5%. The feature was also shown to make people more likely to return to Wikipedia a different day. Given this strong indicator of interest, we plan to proceed with developing the first part of the feature, the image carousel and detail view, toward a full rollout across Wikipedias in March.
Screenshot of the Wikitrivia game on the mobile apps.
For the Wikipedia apps, where our most dedicated and enthusiastic readers are often already spending time, we want to encourage them to return by helping them discover content that feels relevant, meaningful, and fun. Simple, low-effort interactions can help people discover articles they might not have found otherwise, allowing for enjoyment and surprise.
One example of this is the
WikiTrivia game
, which leverages the community-curated
On This Day
page to give Android app users a fun way to discover articles to read, save, or share. About a year after its initial deployment, about 8,000 people play this game every day. Based on
positive feedback
and
data
, we plan to bring it to iOS as well.
Improving search
Three screenshots showing the beta semantic search experience on the Android app.
Today, an estimated
78% of Wikipedia reading sessions begin on external search engines
, with about
90% of those coming from Google Search
. As
referrals from external search decline
, we want our on-platform search to be as effective as possible, so that readers can start their journeys directly on Wikipedia to find trustworthy, reliable answers.
Wikipedia currently only supports keyword search, which retrieves information based on exact words. However,
today’s readers expect search to be able to answer natural-language questions.
To meet this need, we are testing
natural language search so that readers can ask questions
and receive the exact excerpts from Wikipedia articles that answer their questions.
For example, to learn about night vision in cats, we want people to be able to search “Can cats see in the dark” and be shown the night vision section in the cat article. Searching this right now gives the result of the article for
The Battle Cats
, a Japanese iOS game, which is not at all relevant to the question. We are currently testing hybrid search functionality for Android app users on Greek, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, allowing readers to search using natural language and questions as well as keyword matching.
Reading Wikipedia your way
Example screenshot of the saved articles page.
Once readers return to Wikipedia for quick questions or moments of curiosity, we want to encourage them to go deeper as active participants. By strengthening the connection between readers and Wikipedia, we hope to not only support deeper learning, but also to help interested readers better understand how Wikipedia works and potentially become future editors. One way to build this relationship is by giving readers more ways to shape their experience, such as saving, highlighting, or sharing content.
The Reader Experience team has started
experimenting in this area by allowing readers on the web to save an article to a list
, which is already an app feature on Android and iOS. Reading lists are some of the most used features on the apps, with long-standing requests to allow for sync across devices, including desktop. So far, the team has tested bringing reading lists to logged-in readers and plan on releasing a beta version of the feature for all logged-in users this April.
Screenshot example of the activity tab in the apps.
In addition to giving options to shape their reading experience, we want to show readers insights into what they are reading and the ways they learn from Wikipedia. Helping readers understand how they explore Wikipedia can make the experience feel more personal, engaging, and rewarding. To do this, we
redesigned the Android app Edit tab into a richer, more inclusive Activity tab
to show reader-focused content in addition to the already available editing-focused content. The app uses only local data to implement this personalization, so that privacy is protected. Readers enjoy these types of insights; the new tab engaged users by 30% more than the previous editing-only version. We’re encouraged by these results, as they help us learn more about what readers find useful, as well as how to pace the reader journey to editing.
What comes next
Through all of these explorations, we are pursuing the idea that encouraging readers to get more engaged in their reading experience will help the Wikipedia community thrive in the future.
If our efforts are successful, readers will encounter Wikipedia in ways that feel engaging and useful in their everyday lives. Over time, these interactions can build a deep connection and a preference to return to Wikipedia with intention. These active readers can become the donors, editors, and contributors of the future.
How to get involved
We invite community members to share feedback on where this work feels aligned with Wikipedia’s values – and where it may not. In particular, we’re interested in perspectives on reader needs, potential risks, and whether these approaches strengthen or weaken the path from reading to contributing.
You can take part by joining discussions on Meta-Wiki, commenting on experiment pages, or attending upcoming community conversation hours, where we’ll share updates and hear feedback directly.
If you think this work is moving in a good direction, we want to know. If you think we should approach it differently, we want to hear that too. Both kinds of feedback will shape what we build next.
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screenshots of the image browsing feature on mobile
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