Wiki-Highlights

Wiki highlights is a test project to validate or invalidate a hypothesis that if the global youth are offered automated, human-reviewed, visual articles as an alternative reading experience in third-party platforms, we will increase their awareness and engagement of Wikimedia projects as readers and contributors.

Background
One of the Wikimedia Foundation product and tech departments identified areas of work in 2023-24 is the Future Audiences objectives and key results. The Future audience bucket will explore ways for the movement to become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge by making knowledge available to everyone wherever they are on the internet.

The above work aims to reach the global youth who consume information on other platforms with our content to increase their awareness and engagement with our projects (Future Audience KR 2.1).

The Wiki Highlights aligns with Future Audience KR 2.1 and will validate or invalidate one of the hypotheses in the Inuka team's 2023-24 annual plan.


 * “If we offered automated, human-reviewed, visual article summaries generated from Wikipedia articles as an alternative reading experience for younger readers and have them indexed by viable search platforms (Google, Tiktok), we would be able to test whether their interactions with our content & projects would increase engagement. Human-reviewed summaries would be generated for multiple articles and surfaced to a group of readers on mobile, to evaluate their preference for different content formats and topics.  We would evaluate if global youth readers show significant interest towards Wikipedia article summaries and measure engagement based on time spent, number of summaries consumed, summary completion rate and topics with the highest readership."

Rationale for Wiki-Highlights
Trends show us that information consumption patterns for global youth audiences are evolving rapidly and affecting overall traffic to our projects. These patterns are grouped under three categories:


 * Content formats : text, image, video, audio (static and interactive)
 * Content length : short form
 * Content destination : on search, socials and other 3rd party platforms.

Insights by young audiences (18-24 year olds) indicate that:


 * Wikipedia ranks high for school assignments, fact-checking and staying informed.
 * Usage of Wikipedia is very low for social and engagement needs.
 * Wikipedia average usage is under 50% in comparison to other brands.
 * Articles being too long is the 3rd highest reason why they don't use Wikipedia.
 * Improvements like including more images and making articles shorter would spur more usage.

The Wikipedia articles are long and heavy on text; the appeal of this type of content is declining among the younger audience, and there is a need to innovate this content while still maintaining the vital information, and reach the global audience where they are in other platforms.

The goal
Our main goal with this project is to test if automated, human-reviewed visual summaries generated from Wikipedia (Wiki Highlights) are viable reading experiences for global youth audiences on third-party platforms.

Experiment approach
The team will use microsites to conduct A/B testing between different content formats (standard Wikipedia articles and Wikihighlights format) to evaluate the engagement and the experience of the targeted audience (as shown in the table below) on mobile devices.

The Wiki highlights content will be generated by extracting concise overview of facts (2-4 sentences or 300 characters or less) from the sections of lengthy Wikipedia articles, combined with relevant images sourced from Commons. This first experiment will focus on using English articles selected from the following categories and topics.

Product design
The team considered different layout,  interaction and experience design prototypes and subjected them to rounds of user testing exercises in Userlytics, Instagram and Tiktok to analyze target audience preferences towards selecting the preferred design for the microsites as shown in this link.