Readers/Reader Experience/Reading lists/ja
To try to help active Wikipedia readers learn and organize their knowledge, we’re building a way for them to save articles to a “read later” list. This also encourages content curation habits that could lead to future contributions to Wikipedia.
On Desktop
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This screenshot shows how the bookmark icon and saved pages icon appear in the toolbar and navbar on desktop using Vector 2022 skin. -
This screenshot shows how the saved articles page appears on desktop, using Vector 22 skin.
On Mobile
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This screenshot shows how the bookmark icon looks in the toolbar for readers on mobile with Minerva skin. The watchstar is moved to the dropdown overflow menu. -
This screenshot shows how the saved articles page looks on mobile web using Minerva skin.
よくある質問
About Reading Lists
What are Reading Lists?
Reading Lists allow logged-in users to save Wikipedia articles so they can easily return to them later. To save an article, select the bookmark icon near the top of the page. Saved articles can be found on the Reading Lists page.
The initial version focuses on one simple use case: saving an article to read or reference later. We hope to expand the feature over time based on reader and community feedback.
When will Reading Lists become available?
The feature will be deployed in phases:
- – ベンガル語版ウィキペディア, 中国語版ウィキペディア, チェコ語版ウィキペディア, ベトナム語版ウィキペディア
- – アラビア語版ウィキペディア, フランス語版ウィキペディア, インドネシア語版ウィキペディア
- – 英語版ウィキペディア
- – All remaining Wikipedias
The phased rollout gives the team time to monitor the feature and address unexpected problems before expanding it further.
Who can use Reading Lists?
All logged-in users will be able to save articles to their Reading Lists.
Which skins support Reading Lists? Will you add Reading Lists to my skin?
Reading Lists is currently supported on Vector 2022 and Minerva. They are not currently supported in older skins such as Vector 2010 or Monobook.
We do not currently have the capacity to support Reading Lists in Timeless, Modern, Monobook or CologneBlue.
What kinds of pages can I save?
The initial version supports articles in the main namespace.
We have received requests to support pages in additional namespaces, such as Wikipedia project pages, and are considering this for future work.
Is there a limit to how many articles I can save?
The limit to articles that can be saved is 5000.
How do I remove an article from my Reading List?
To remove an article from your Reading List, return to the article page and select the bookmark icon, which will unsave the page. If the article has been added to any custom lists you have created in the Wikipedia mobile apps, you will be asked to confirm whether the article should be removed from all lists.
We have received requests for functionality to remove articles directly from the Saved items page, and are considering this for future work.
Can I turn Reading Lists off or hide the bookmark?
Currently, no. This is not an opt-out feature and we don’t currently have plans to make the bookmark configurable.
Reading Lists and Watchlists
How are Reading Lists different from the Watchlist?
Reading Lists and the Watchlist serve different purposes:
- Reading Lists help users save articles that they want to read or revisit.
- The Watchlist helps editors monitor changes made to pages.
Saving an article does not add it to your Watchlist, and watching a page does not automatically add it to your Reading List. You can save and watch the same article if you want to do both.
Will Reading Lists replace the Watchlist?
No. The Watchlist will continue to be available.
During the beta period, the bookmark displaced the watchstar in some parts of the interface. Many editors told us that this made the Watchlist harder to access. In response, we revised the desktop design so that the bookmark and watchstar can both appear as article actions in the toolbar. We added a “watch” label to the watchstar to clarify the difference between the two icons.
On mobile and in the sticky header, space is more limited and text labels are not as feasible. On mobile, the bookmark will be the only button visible and the watchstar will move to the overflow menu. In the sticky header on desktop view, both the bookmark and watchstar icons sit side-by-side. We will continue monitoring the usage and placement of these buttons to see if and how we need to update them.
Where did my Watchstar go?
On mobile, for article pages the watch star can be found in the ellipsis dropdown menu on the far side of the UI.
On Vector 2022, the watchstar is always displayed.
Accessing Reading Lists
Why do I need an account to save articles?
An account allows saved articles to be associated with you and made available when you return to Wikipedia or use another supported device or platform.
Logged-out readers can still use browser bookmarks without creating a Wikipedia account.
Are my saved articles public?
No. The current feature creates a private, personal Reading List. It does not create publicly viewable lists or ask Wikimedia communities to moderate user-generated list content.
A previous Wikimedia project called Gather from 2015 explored public article lists and was discontinued following concerns about moderation and community involvement. Reading Lists do not reintroduce that model. Any future proposal involving public lists would require a careful review of that history and active community consultation.
Can I access the same Reading Lists on desktop, mobile web, and the Wikipedia apps?
Reading Lists are intended to support saving and accessing articles across web and app experiences. Reading Lists functionality has existed for some time in the Wikipedia Android and iOS apps, and bringing it to desktop and mobile web responds to a longstanding Community Wishlist request. The user can enable syncing on the mobile apps for pages in order saved on mobile to appear on web.
Can I organize saved articles into folders, collections, or categories? Can I see the custom lists that I have in Apps?
Not yet. The initial web version places saved articles in a single Reading List.
The ability to organize articles into folders, collections, or categories was the most frequently requested improvement during the beta period. The team is now developing ideas for collections on desktop and mobile web and plans to share work-in-progress designs for community feedback. 作業の進捗は Phabricator でチェック。
Potential Expansions for Reading Lists
Can I add notes, highlights, or images to my Reading List?
Not currently. Requests to add notes and to save highlights, quotations, or images have been recorded as possible future expansions of the feature.
Can I sort my list or switch between grid and list views?
The initial version has limited organization and display options. Additional sorting options and a compact list view have both been requested and are being considered for future updates.
Other suggestions under consideration include showing when an article was saved, displaying the number of saved articles, and offering a random article from the list.
Can I share, export, or batch-download my Reading List?
There are no current plans for an export or batch-download feature, but the team may explore it if there is sufficient demand.
What improvements are being considered next?
The most frequently requested improvement is the ability to organize saved articles into collections, folders, or categories.
Other requests include:
- More sorting and display options
- Notes, highlights, quotations, and images
- Support for additional namespaces
- Sharing and exporting
- A list view
- Information about when articles were saved
- A random saved article
- Suggested articles based on saved content
These ideas are not all committed roadmap items. We will continue evaluating them based on user needs, community feedback, technical feasibility, and available resources.
How can I report a problem or suggest an improvement?
Please leave feedback, ideas, or concerns on the project talk page.
If reporting a bug, please include:
- The wiki where the problem occurred
- Whether you were using desktop or mobile
- Your browser and skin
- What you expected to happen
- What happened instead
- A screenshot or exact error message, if available
Technical problems may also be documented and tracked in Phabricator.
Updates
August/September 2026: Full feature deploy
Starting August 25, the feature will be fully deployed to Bengali, Chinese, Czech, and Vietnamese wikis. Editors will begin to see the bookmark next to their watchstar.
The beta period helped us to both validate the usefulness of the feature and to fix bugs for a smoother, more polished user experience. We are now confident in the feature’s readiness as a full feature.
We will be following a phased rollout plan. After we deploy to the first four pilot wikis, we will deploy to Arabic, French, and Indonesian wikis on September 1, followed by English on September 14, followed by all other wikis on September 28.
Based on our findings from the Call to Action experiment shared below, we will also start showing the bookmark icon to logged out users on mobile web instead of the watchstar throughout September. We will consider introducing a bookmark button for anonymous users on desktop shortly after.
July 2026: Beta feature rollout results
Of the 1620 total surveys we received during the time the beta feature was active [April – June 2026]:
- 1509 were positive (93.1%), 111 were negative (6.9%).
- 28% of comments, more than 800 in total, included open-ended feedback (submitted across many languages).
Main themes and requests we received as open-ended feedback:
- 26% of the comments were just general praise [ie, "I like this"]
Some quotes we heard:
- “It's useful for me to go to something that I will be looking at more without having to search it up again.”
- “Really useful function to find the items you need.”
- “Makes my life better lol”
- “I sometimes don't fully finish articles, I have ADHD, and I can get very distracted, so having this feature will make me happier knowing I can find the pages I wanted to look at, and remember what I was trying to read be4 getting distracted! :3”
The most requested feature update is the ability to organize reading lists into folders, collections or categories, similar to what the mobile apps allows.
Other requested additions:
- Other sorting options
- Ability to add notes
- Sharing and exporting
- Support more namespaces, rather than just articles
Most of the negative feedback was about the watchstar being displaced from the navigation, which is something we are working to address.
May 2026: Call to action experiment results
We conducted an experiment across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis from May 18 - June 18, showing logged-out readers on mobile web a bookmark icon instead of the Watchstar.
We saw that about twice as many users tapped on the bookmark compared to the star, indicating desire from anonymous users to save articles. Users who tapped on the bookmark were invited to create an account, and they entered the account creation flow at four times the rate compared to anonymous users who see the standard invitation to create an account in order to watch a page for changes.
As a result of these findings, we would like to start showing the bookmark icon to logged out users on mobile web when we launch the full feature.
January 2026: A/B test 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.
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:
- Collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from readers and communities through user research, metrics, and external trends.
- 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:
- Discuss reading list feature with communities and iterate design based on conversations.
- Design simple on-wiki experiment for reading lists on desktop.
- Run experiment for 2–4 weeks.
- Turn feature off.
- Analyze data.
- Report back on results and proposed next steps.
Questions this phase will answer:
- Are reading lists useful to readers?
- Should we continue working on reading lists?
- Should we test reading lists as a beta feature?
- 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 2 (January – June 2026): Bring reading lists to wikis
Steps:
- Discuss bringing the feature as a beta feature or full feature for logged-in users.
- Design and implement any changes required.
- Design and implement additional functionality if required.
- Bring feature to wikis for logged-in users.
- Capture both quantitative and qualitative feedback from users via on-wiki QuickSurveys
- Discuss communicating about the feature with logged-out users so they can create an account to use it.
Questions this phase will answer:
- Did reading lists perform as well in reality as they did in the experiment?
- Are there any changes or customizations necessary for reading lists?
- Do reading lists on web work well with reading lists on the apps?
- Are users satisfied with the feature?
- 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
Steps:
- Identify how frequently readers are creating accounts using the existing watchstar button that is visible to logged-out users on mobile web.
- 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.
- Launch the experiment to a limited audience on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias (from May 18 through June 18).
- Share out learnings regarding effectiveness of encouraging readers to sign up for accounts.