Wikipedia.org Portal Project

The Wikimedia.org Portal is a project within the Discovery Department to change the http://www.wikipedia.org portal page to better serve Wikipedia users.

Our early efforts in this project are around measuring how our users use the portal page, learning our user expectation around this page and how we can better serve them.

Rationale
The Wikimedia Discovery team wants to improve the experience for the users visiting Wikipedia.org portal page and help them get to the information they are looking for as fast as possible. Wikipedia.org portal page gets around 10 million daily pageviews, which is roughly 1.5-2% of our total page views. To better serve this large audience, we want to make sure that this page is easy to understand and use. We want to increase the usability of the search text box, so more people will run a search query and get to their preferred article faster. We want to decrease the number of people who leave the page without continuing on to Wikipedia. We also want to better understand what people expect from this page so we can address their needs. In the future, we want to serve language, location and time specific content on this page too.

Initial Goals

 * Decrease bounce rate on wikipedia.org portal page
 * Increase searches and clicks on results from the search textbox
 * Increase clickthrough to non-top-10-language wikis
 * Increase clickthrough for other Wikimedia projects

A/B testing
As part of this initiative the Discovery team performed a A/B test on Wikipedia.org between January 13 - 20, 2016 to measure if the proposed improvements are beneficial to our users. The findings of these tests. This was an A/B test to determine the impact of various user experience improvements to the Wikipedia portal (www.wikipedia.org) aimed at increasing the rate at which users click-through to our other Wiki projects. Specifically, we looked at increasing the size and prominence of the search box while pairing images and Wikidata metadata with each search result (see the fourth visual mockup below). We found evidence that the combination of these elements results in a 1.7% to 5.5% higher clickthrough rate. Put another way that's roughly an increase of 300,000 to 1.3 million page views a day into our projects - a solid improvement. Absent non-JavaScript support (which we are working on), we recommend the improvement be deployed to the production Wikimedia.org portal, tentatively scheduled for March 2016. (Update: this was released to production on March 10, 2016)

Wikipedia.org Portal A/B testing

A tentative list A/B tests
These are A/B tests that the Discovery team has lined up to perform in the near future (with some draft versions of the corresponding visual mocks-ups):


 * 1) Language links resorted around the globe, based on detection of the user's preferred language setting (tentatively scheduled for March 2016)
 * 2) Add localized "The Free Encyclopedia" under the Wikipedia wordmark
 * 3) Collapsing the languages by article counts (secondary links) into a dropdown
 * 4) Adding new treatment to other (sister) project links (ie: text description)
 * 5) Collapsing the primary links around the globe into a single line of links
 * 6) Add in trending (or recommended) articles

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A/B tests that we completed in Q3 2015:

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 * 1) A bigger and more prominent search box and search button on desktop
 * 2) A bigger and more prominent search box and search button on mobile
 * 3) Showing results with thumbnail images and Wikidata metadata in type-ahead suggestion box

Completed 2015 Q3

 * Disabling inline JavaScript (JS is now a separate file that most browsers will use, but not all)
 * Missing scroll bar in Chrome bug fix
 * Set up an archive of previous A/B tests
 * Update links on Portal to be the same blue color
 * Replace portal images with sprites for ease of fast loading
 * Create a script to sync and purge varnish cache during deployments
 * Update Portal stats for articles
 * Search icon screen flash bug fix
 * Update Portal stats for articles
 * Prominent search box with type-ahead and meta data in results
 * Disable the 'find a language' search box and arrow button
 * Display a magnifying glass without the word 'search'
 * Language selector to use native selector on mobile
 * Support a non-JavaScript version of the language picker

Analysis

 * Meeting: Rethinking portal planning 2016-02-03
 * Analysis: Results of removing inline JavaScript on wikipedia.org portal page
 * Meeting: Wikipedia Portal and JavaScript Usage - review meeting notes 2016-02-11


 * Presentation of Analysis: Browsers Geography and JavaScript Support on Wikipedia Portal (PDF)
 * Analysis: Referrers of the10% of traffic to Wikipedia Portal that is referred by something other than a search engine
 * Analysis: Assessment of Portal update and its impact on search rate post-deployment
 * Analysis: Clickthrough rates, section usage, and language preferences of Portal visitors

In Progress 2015 Q3

 * A/B test for language detection on the Portal to reorder and resort the primary links on the page to suit the user better

Future Work of interest (not A/B tests)

 * Update mobile version of portal page to garner better Google stats
 * Localized language ghost text in search box
 * Investigate using translatewiki.net for localizing languages
 * Investigate using the Universal Language Selector tool

Tentative Future Ideas

 * Bringing in relevant content from other Wikimedia projects on this page
 * Recommending articles to read and edit
 * Showing trending articles to read and edit
 * Localize the content on this page depending on where the visitor is visiting from
 * Show more timely content
 * More visual content
 * Announcements for new tools and features (wmf & community)
 * Creating a Portal Labs page for user feedback on ideas and designs

Portal Experiments, Research Documentation
For more information about how our data analysis team is working on this project please refer to: Research: Portal experiments

Browser Support
We will be following the guidelines listed on MediaWiki for Compatibility. For example, this will mean that the JavaScript that we have on the Portal page will be targeted for IE9 and newer, while IE8 and below would have a basic CSS experience.

Current quarter work

 * See Wikimedia Engineering's current quarter goals for the team.


 * Make www.wikipedia.org a portal for exploring open content on Wikimedia sites.