Readers

Group:	Product and Technology
Start:	July 2025
Team members:	Reader Experience, Reader Growth, Wikimedia Apps
Management:	Nat Baca (Director of Engineering, Core Experiences), Olga Vasileva (Group Product Manager, Consumers), Carolyn Li-Madeo (Group Design Manager, Consumers)

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The Readers teams (Reader Experience , Reader Growth , Wikimedia Apps ) build and maintain software for the reading experiences for all the users of the Wikimedia projects on the web and in the Wikipedia mobile apps. Reader Experience focuses on enhancing familiar ways of learning and engagement for active readers, while Reader Growth focuses on new ways of learning and engagement for new and casual readers. The reader-focused work of the Wikimedia Apps teams also falls under the scope of the Readers teams.

This approach is designed to ensure that our work advances both foundational and transformative user experiences, addressing the evolving needs of our projects and their diverse audiences. We work across platforms (mobile, desktop, apps), and are part of the Core Experiences group.

The work of all three teams – Apps, Reader Experience, and Reader Growth – is jointly overseen by Olga Vasileva and Nat Baca.

Check out our repository and learn more about:

Our software component responsibilities
The mobile web interface

All reader-focused work was previously housed under one umbrella as Reading Web (archived) , which was split in July 2025 to seed these two teams.

Prior to its iteration as the Web team, the team was known Reading Web or Readers Web, and before that (until 2015-ish) Mobile Web. You may still find these names used in the documentation.

Projects

Our work constitutes most of the objective Wiki Experiences 3: Consumer Experiences (WE3; owner: Olga).

Our objective is that readers from multiple generations engage, and stay engaged, with Wikipedia, leading to measurable increases in retention and donation activity.

This objective will focus on retaining new readers through innovative content formats, core audiences through strengthening familiar reading experiences, and ensuring long-term sustainability by deepening reader connections and diversifying donations. It will include a continuation of our work into making content easier to discover through new and more experimental features such as AI summaries or personalized rabbit holes. It will also include work on retaining and improving the quality of the reading experience deeper in the reading funnel and on exploring reading curation through reading lists and other non-editing participation. For donors, this work will continue focusing on diversifying revenue sources from within the platform.

The code in the brackets (ie, "WE3") is used in the annual plans, and helps identify and report the projects (key results) and smaller pieces of work for each key result (hypotheses).

Each page below corresponds with one of our projects dedicated to this objective (key results) and details its associated work.

WE3.1 Engaging new audiences (WE3.1; owner: Olga) – achieve a practically significant increase in logged-out reader retention, as measured through A/B testing of one feature per platform.
WE3.2 Diversifying donation opportunities (WE3.2; owner: Jazmin) – increase the number of donations through non-banner or email methods by 5% YoY per platform through product interventions that foster deeper connections and reduce friction for donors.
WE3.3 Engaging core audiences (WE3.3; owner: Hsuanwei) – demonstrate a practically significant increase in logged-in reader retention, as measured through A/B testing of one feature per platform.
WE3.6 Consumer strategy (WE3.6; owner: Olga) – finalize, publish, and communicate a strategy for the Wikipedia reader and consumer experience across platforms.

Why do we focus on readers?

The Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Tech departments' strategic vision is a multigenerational project that supports evolving ways of creating and engaging with free knowledge. Even as the internet becomes cluttered with low-quality information, Wikipedia remains a critical trustworthy source of neutral human-curated knowledge.

Yet we are facing an existential challenge: our pageviews have flattened or declined, even as global internet use continues to grow. The percentage of people worldwide who know and use Wikipedia is shrinking, and accordingly, so is the percentage of users who might become inspired to contribute to Wikipedia in the future, as editors or donors.

This decline is driven by new generations learning through new platforms and technologies. The way people learn online has shifted drastically in recent years. Specifically new generations learn from and use the internet in ways different from how they have traditionally used Wikipedia. New generations of internet users are less reliant on search engines for information seeking, and more prone to experiences within specific apps that are heavily personalized and encourage a lean-back approach — different from the specific fact seeking which drives most of our current pageviews.

This rapidly changing internet is also full of new, and sometimes more useful, ways to access knowledge and learn. Global internet users are more diverse, not only in age and geography, but also in what they need from learning and being online - there's visual learners and audio learners, people who prefer depth over breadth and vice versa, people who want a fact in 10 seconds, and those willing to spend hours in a rabbit hole.

In the past, we could take for granted that most people using the internet would encounter Wikipedia often. Today, we need to recognize that every visit is a crucial opportunity to spark a lifelong affinity to Wikipedia. In order to introduce a new generation to Wikipedia, we need to ensure that when they do land on the site, it is immediately useful and memorable enough to make them curious and encourage them to return the next time they see a link to Wikipedia. For those millions of people who visit Wikipedia often, we need to solidify their long-term connection to Wikipedia so that they grow into the editors and communities of the future.

Questions for communities

Tell us about someone you know who reads, but does not edit Wikipedia:

Why do they read Wikipedia?
What's one thing that would help them better learn from Wikipedia?

Projects

Why do we focus on readers?

Questions for communities

See also