Readers/Reader Experience/WE3.3.4 Reading lists

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To support current active readers on the wikis in their goals of learning from Wikipedia, we want to experiment 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.

Our hypothesis is that if we give logged-in readers the ability to save articles to a private reading list, we expect engagement on the site to increase, as measured by a 5% increase in internal referral traffic for readers who use the feature, and a statistically significant increase for all users.

Owner is Jan, delegate owner is Anne.

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.

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.

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 1 (August – November 2025): 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 (November 2025 – January 2026, if experiment is successful): 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.
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?

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 (January – March 2026, if phase 2 is successful): TBD

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. 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 1 plan

Metrics

The first experiment we want to start with is to validate whether:

Readers save items to their reading lists, measured by clickthrough rates, the number of lists created, and the number of articles in each list.
This helps readers read more over time, measured by the number of internally referred pageviews.
This helps readers come back to Wikipedia more frequently, measured by how often they return in a two-week time span.

Requirements

Readers will be able to save an article to a list.
We will only have one list (we can build multiple lists later if this experiment is successful).
Readers will be able to view their list.
The feature will only be available for logged-in readers with 0 edits.

Design

This design below is a draft meant for receiving community feedback and running this initial experiment. This design will change based on community feedback, reader feedback, and experiment results.