Readers/Reader Experience/Reading lists

To support current active readers on the wikis in their goals of learning from Wikipedia, we have been experimenting with allowing readers to save articles to a list for reading later, helping them organize their knowledge while also building a practice of content curation that could pave the way for future contributions to Wikipedia.

Mockup of save article feature on desktop English Wikipedia

Mockup of saved articles page on desktop English Wikipedia

Background

We want to ensure Wikipedia is useful for active readers As we work to broaden our reach for a new generation of readers, it's important that we also ensure our current readers, those who are already spending time on the site, continue to find value in Wikipedia. We want to help these readers not only read from Wikipedia passively, but engage in deeper learning that is useful for their knowledge goals and everyday life. We think this will help create a more personal relationship with Wikipedia, one that could down the line lead to making their first edit or getting involved in the movement.

We think a big part of this transition from reading to learning will be to allow for readers to begin self-curating the articles and content they might need at a later time. This could mean a number of different things – saving an article to read later, highlighting a sentence that stands out, saving bits of articles to form a collection of knowledge, and more.

A second benefit of this approach is that, by actively organizing and interacting with knowledge for their own learning, readers are not only gaining this knowledge, but also building a practice of engaging with Wikipedia in an active way, which can make a future transition to activities like editing feel less intimidating.

When thinking about curation opportunities, we first want to explore the simplest approach – allowing readers to save an article to a list for reading later.

Previous iterations

Reading lists exist and are already highly utilized on the Wikipedia Apps. Curation features such as reading lists and tabs are some of the most used and requested features on the Android and iOS apps, with long-standing requests to allow for sync across devices, including desktop. There is a longstanding Community Wishlist request from 2021 to have the apps reading lists available on mobile and desktop. This project will allow us to experiment with bringing these types of features to desktop and mobile web, and allow for syncing and usage across platforms.

Experiment timeline

Phase 0 (July – August 2025): Identify problem

Steps:

1. Collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from readers and communities through user research, metrics, and external trends.
2. Apply data to identify the problem we need to solve.

Problem we identified:

• Both new and existing readers aren't returning to Wikipedia as often as we would like them to, and pageviews to our projects are declining.
• We don't currently have many ways for readers to personalize or curate their experience on Wikipedia.

Phase 0: initial ideas and feedback

For early ideas and feedback, we hosted in-person conversations with early-stage design ideas and demos at Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi and WikiCon North America 2025 in New York City to solicit ideas and responses, as well as online on the English Wikipedia Discord. We also discussed this onwiki at the relevant pilot wiki Village Pumps.

Risks associated with this project that we are aware of include:

• Confusion between reading lists and watchlists
  • Editors may mistake the reading list feature for a new or duplicate version of the watchlist.
  • The star icon is already associated with the watchlist; adding another similar icon or button may reinforce confusion.
  • The reading list and watchlist icons appear next to each other, potentially making it harder to distinguish functions at a glance.
• Impact on editor experience and onboarding
  • Over-differentiating reader and editor interfaces risks creating barriers for newcomers transitioning from reading to editing.
  • Editors value a consistent interface across reading and editing modes.

Historical context: A previous Wikimedia project (“Gather”) explored public article lists and was discontinued due to unresolved community concerns, including moderation burden and lack of community buy-in. Any future consideration of public lists will first thoroughly review this history and involve active community consultation.

Phase 1 (August 2025 – January 2026): Validate whether reading lists are useful

Steps:

1. Discuss reading list feature with communities and iterate design based on conversations.
2. Design simple on-wiki experiment for reading lists on desktop.
3. Run experiment for 2–4 weeks.
4. Turn feature off.
5. Analyze data.
6. Report back on results and proposed next steps.

Questions this phase will answer:

1. Are reading lists useful to readers?
2. Should we continue working on reading lists?
3. Should we test reading lists as a beta feature?
4. Should we bring reading lists as a default to wikis?

Hypothesis evaluation: Was the hypothesis correct?

• ✅ If yes → continue
• ❌ If no → stop the project and document what we learned.

Phase 1: experiment results

Our primary success metric was the clickthrough rate (CTR) on the save article icon. CTR measures how often readers engage with the feature, helping us understand whether people notice it and choose to use it. Typical web CTR is between 1-5%. On English Wikipedia, we observed a clickthrough rate of 0.88% for the “save” button in the reading list experiment. Because saving an article reflects a specific intent — returning to that article later — we did not expect engagement rates comparable to more general navigation actions.

Our experiment was intentionally limited in scope to non-editor users in order to avoid interfering with existing editing and moderation workflows. In this test, a randomly selected half of logged-in users who met the criteria below were assigned to the treatment group, where they saw the Reading List feature: (1) active in the last 3 months, (2) 0 edits, (3) zero watchlist items (except for user page and user talk page), and (4) zero existing Reading List tables. The remaining half were assigned to the control group, where they experienced the current interface.

As a result, exposure to the experimental feature was relatively low. This was expected given the narrow audience segment, and it also reflects a broader challenge: for readers who do not edit, there are currently few reasons to log in, since most logged-in functionality on Wikipedia is designed for editors.

Additionally, we found that users that engaged with the feature had substantially higher rates of internal referral – that is, they landed on the page from another page on Wikipedia. This tendency indicates that users who are naturally more invested in Wikipedia find more value in the feature.

Based on these results, we plan to move forward with the feature and continue to collect data and information.

We are planning on trying this out as a beta feature for logged-in readers in two phases. In the first stage, we would run it on five pilot wikis the week of April 6, 2026 – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese. Then after two weeks of monitoring and fixing any bugs, we would roll out to all other wikis the week of April 20, 2026.

In order to improve the exposure rate to average readers, we will opt all new users signing up for an account into the beta feature. For existing users, they would have to go in and turn on the beta feature to see it.

We will be collecting feedback via QuickSurvey on whether beta users find it to be useful.

Phase 2 (January – June 2026): Bring reading lists to wikis

Steps:

1. Discuss bringing the feature as a beta feature or full feature for logged-in users.
2. Design and implement any changes required.
3. Design and implement additional functionality if required.
4. Bring feature to wikis for logged-in users.
5. Capture both quantitative and qualitative feedback from users via on-wiki QuickSurveys
6. Discuss communicating about the feature with logged-out users so they can create an account to use it.

Questions this phase will answer:

1. Did reading lists perform as well in reality as they did in the experiment?
2. Are there any changes or customizations necessary for reading lists?
3. Do reading lists on web work well with reading lists on the apps?
4. Are users satisfied with the feature?
5. What other functionality do they hope to see for the next iteration?

Launch evaluation: Did the feature behave as expected in production?

• ✅ If yes → continue
• ❌ If no → stop the project and document what we learned.

Phase 3 (April – June 2026 if beta rollout is smooth): Show reading list bookmark to logged out mobile web readers as an experiment to drive account creations

On mobile web browsers, logged out users who are in the experiment group will see a bookmark inviting them to create an account in order to save pages that are of interest to them.

Steps:

1. Identify how frequently readers are creating accounts using the existing watchstar button that is visible to logged-out users on mobile web.
2. Design an A/B experiment that compares account creation rates between the standard watchstar and a bookmark icon that is shown to logged out users.
3. Launch the experiment to a limited audience on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias (from May 18 through June 18).
4. Share out learnings regarding effectiveness of encouraging readers to sign up for accounts.