Wikipedia.org Portal A/B testing

Proposer
Deb Tankersley, Product Manager, Discovery Department

Background
We want to ensure that the Wikipedia.org Portal page is easy to use and understand while promoting further discovery into Wikipedia and it's various other projects.

The Portal page has around 10 million daily pageviews. This is awesome, however, there is a majority of our visitors that simply leave the page without doing a search, selecting a language link or clicking into a sister project page. We want to change that by presenting intriguing and interesting content with a more modern look and feel to the page.

We've recently updated the search box to be more prominent and to serve up meta data in the dynamic type-ahead search results so that visitors will be able to choose exactly what they were looking for.

Now, it's time to refresh the page to be more dynamic and visually stimulating.

Objective
We want to enhance the Portal page so that it entices visitors to read more articles on Wikipedia and make it easier to select a preferred language in which to search for articles.

Key result
Our suceessful work will show a decrease in the amount of visitors that do nothing when they arrive on the Wikipedia.org Portal page while increasing the overall clickthrough rate.

To do this, starting in Q4 2015/2016 (April - June 2016) and beyond, we will conduct a variety of A/B tests and analyze the data from our visitors. Once testing and analysis is done, we'll publish the results and solicit feedback.

Sample tests that could be conducted will be done by updating the visual treatment of the:
 * Top 10 languages
 * Languages by article count
 * Other (sister) project links
 * and adding most visited / trending articles