Talk:Readers

Strange to see the history of a department replaced for a new team

The content from Special:Permalink/6404489 really feels like it deserves to continue to exist. -- BDavis (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

Hey @BDavis (WMF), I boldly edited the page; hope this is an adequate solution, explaining some context of the previous incarnation. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:52, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF) I agree with @BDavis (WMF), it feels like blanking... since it's stuck in the page history and not a standalone article in its own right. I think it's fair Readers disambiguates naturally to the active project, but then the old page i.m.o. archived to Readers department since it had a different full name. Alas it has way too many names: 2015–2017 Reading department with Engineering, 2017–2019 Readers department with Audiences, and 2019–2024 Readers department with Product. Alas. It must stay hidden away. As is natural when disambiguating exact terms, I put a hatnote at the top of the page at least to help with the principle of least surprise. Waddie96 (talk) 20:23, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

I agree, it should be restored in my opinion, in some way or another. FaviFake (talk) 07:28, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps we could delete/unmerge/restore the lost version in a new place? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:54, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

As a note, I'm happy to do this, but want some buy-in from the team first before mucking around with their pages. :-) @SGrabarczuk (WMF), would this be OK? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm not with Readers anymore, I just helped them update their pages. I believe it's gonna be simpler if you talk to them as a group directly :D SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Oh, sorry, no worries at all. There's no director listed on any of the team pages, but presumably they report up to Marshall/Nat, given we want a group-wide decision? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:58, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, they report to Olga on the PM end and Nat on the engineering end. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

How can i subscribe to the new newletter?

Hi, is there a way i can receive the future newletter issues on my talkpage on enwiki? The first issue doesn't say anything about subscribing. FaviFake (talk) 21:59, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for my delay here!

Navigate to Special:Newsletters. Find the Readers newsletter and click the subscribe link on the right side of the table. Let me know if that doesn't work or if you have any questions! EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 16:02, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, I'va added that info to the newletter page: [1] FaviFake (talk) 18:25, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Feedback

At Readers/Newsletter updates it says:

For all of this work, we want to hear from you! For example...

• What are ways you think we can be more useful on a person’s first ever visit to Wikipedia, whether they’re 20 or 85?
• How do you think we can help more experienced readers go from simply reading to actively learning?
• Where do you see opportunities for supporting visual and auditory learners?

I don't know if this is supposed to be replied to here or if later these or such questions will be part of that feedback invitation referred to at the end of the page (which however also says feedback on some upcoming experiments) or if they were meant just as examples but I'd like to just briefly leave my take on these here:

• 1. Also having a simpler version of the article and/or section the user came to Wikipedia for – this could be a simple summary of the section at its top, adding a second simpler lead that can be shown with a click, better integration with simple Wikipedia, or other approaches 2. more better illustrating images (such as diagrams) and data visualizations (such as charts including interactive ones) 3. matching the quality, depth and coverage of English Wikipedia (and this is more about making people use Wikipedia more often and for it to be more useful but also about this) – see proposal here
• The question is a bit unclear – maybe you mean systematic learning or retaining what has been learned or the use of it for some academic or professional purposes and/or something else. I don't know why simply reading about a topic of substance would not be learning. One way would be to make long articles that nearly none of the readers actually read in full or to near fullness read more (see next point). I guess another one would be to create questions about key points in the article that the user can then answer to see how well they understood or remember how much to e.g. reread some parts or look something up they didn't understand.
• I see a huge opportunity for auditory learners and people who like to read many and/or long articles by these two steps: 1. upgrading the Spoken Wikipedia audio player to a proper modern audio player inbcluding podcast functions like skip 10 sec back and not (proposal is here) and 2. using AI to create audio versions of Wikipedia articles en-masse to the extent that >95% of articles have an audio version that is a professional narrator quality (ie listenability) that home amateur recordings just very rarely come close to, as demonstrated at small scale at en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia spoken by AI voice. For visual learners, again more illustrating images.

Prototyperspective (talk) 23:01, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for this note, @Prototyperspective! And apologies for the overlong delay in replying.

The simplification idea is a good one, since there is some evidence that certain articles are written at a higher reading level than the average reader. We are thinking through ways that could potentially further similar goals of supporting a wide range of reading levels without co-opting or changing article content.

For the learning question, we're interested in thinking through with you all ways for learning that support engagement deeper than just finding a quick fact, like a celebrity's birth date. It could mean a quiz to test retention of an article's content or ease of finding relevant related articles for further reading.

The auditory learning idea is an interesting one that I know some teams at the Foundation are thinking about. For visual learners, the Reader Growth team is currently conducting an experiment to change how images can be browsed on mobile and desktop, titled Image browsing, with the hope that by improving the visual experience, readers gain more from the article's content overall. I'd love for you to take a look and let me know what you think! EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 18:10, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply and considering my suggestions. I think I'll try outlining the article-simplification ideas at a bit more detail now in the Wishlist which I had planned to do eventually – if there's something to add, you'd be very welcome to add it to the talk page there.

Same goes for concept of quizzes. I think a caveat there is these are probably quite simple to let an AI create and that maintaining article-associated quiz-questions could add even more workload on the scarce volunteers. I think articles are usually already well-linked in specifically English Wikipedia (and I guess usually fine also in other wikis where the main problem would be lack of articles and lack of depth/sections/info in existing articles). One thing there would be the low-hanging fruit of increasing the number of 'Because you read' tiles in the app (and afterwards maybe further expanding on the BYR & the app's Discover suggestions e.g. by using WikiProject importance ratings and enabling the user to specify which areas they'd like to develop their expertise/knowledge).

I hope the teams thinking about auditory learning do or will also consider upgrading the audio player / enabling an upgraded player. Without that, audio doesn't stand much of a chance despite of the huge potential. Thanks for the link, meant to read and probably provide some feedback on its talk page…but it must have drowned in my todos – will do that first now. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:55, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

How about a trusted AI using only Wikipedia sources?

How about a trusted AI using only Wikipedia sources? ~2025-29414-91 (talk) 10:46, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

It's here: https://wikichat.genie.stanford.edu/ and see also W442: Adopt Wikipedia-trained WikiChat LLM & make it learn about help pages & categories to help newcomers. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:02, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

How do readers perceive Wikipedia

Just a feedback to this : 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?

From my experience of speaking to people about Wikipedia, what I saw is that, when I ask them if they know Wikipedia and if they use it, they often use it but they do not identify clearly that it's Wikipedia. This may seem strange to you, but you should investigate it : do people correctly know the brand and the site ? Seems often their first awareness of Wikipedia are the donation campaigns and the only point they retain : Wikipedia needs money and it's Jimmy Wales (!). They do so even if the campaign is no more in use now. This is their memory about Wikipedia. The first answers given by Google are often Wikipedia's article, but sometimes also a stuff created by the AI of Google, so it's unclear for people if the page they where they land after there request is Google, or an average answer, or a specific site like Wikipedia. So one very important thing is to help people to identify that they have landed on a specific site and project which is called Wikipedia etc...

I suggest you propose sometimes to readers additional funny stuf asking questions to people, going to a quiz, discovering content etc... This must be recreative content or simple discovery, without any goal, just for the fun. All the content should be based on Wikipedia or Wikidata, Commons, Wikquote etc... but it should be displayed in a different layout than Wikipedia's one and then should link to the original content of Wikipedia itself, the articles. Use more floating toolbars on mobiles to give additional information and content, give access to the editing tools, show the structure of the article that has disappeared in the mobile version and is necessary to orientate oneself in the article and maybe contribute. Design floating toolbars in an attractive way. The layout of Wikipedia has a robust utilitarian and efficient template, but it's such a depressing design from the late nineties, sorry to say that. So it's necessary to build a bridge from the fancy attractive land of social medias and advertisings, the environment where average people live, to the austere monacal presentation of the encyclopedia. Create something like a decompression chamber in order that people can accustom them to the specific atmosphere of Wikipedia's contribution platform.

Concerning the ability to modify an article and become an editor on Wikipedia, it's something which is difficult for people to understand. There are many steps needed to become a contributor, so that not so easy to explain it shortly and for people to understand what it will imply for them and what they will have to do exactly (also how much time ressources it needs). The questions we should ask ourselves : how can we structure the articles in order to allow people to do microeditions as a first and satisfying contact with edition ? I'm advocating since a long time for a monitoring tool for Wikipedia like recoin for Wikidata. A list of small things that could be done to ameliorate an article. So people could have a critical vision of the article and correct or ameliorate details. I believe the rest will follow if they do a first successful microedition. Also one thing that I have proposed successfuly to the public and that people adore : give them the opportunity to try the edition in a game or mocking site (please avoid the horrible sandbox and it's realtime failure in public). What I have proposed on an exhibition stand and that people loved : they could seat in front of my computer. On my personal draft page, I proposed series of numbers. They just had to pick one. I explained them how to make and automatic reference at the end of a sentence by copy pasting. They pasted the number (a DOI in fact), and, oh surprise, a complete reference of a book appeared like magic, ready to be integrated at the end of the sentence. You cannot imagine how people where happy because this experience was easy and deeply satisfying ! At the reverse, with the pile of books I brought on the stand, I learned them in a minute how to select a sentence, rewrite it, and then get easily for copy-paste thei DOI on Worldcat to be able to add the citation to the sentence. That's an experience that can be proposed online as well with small games that reproduce the environment of Wikipedia but without a direct implication on the edition of the encyclopedia. What people need are online or offline spaces where they can just experiment without pressure or danger, or real acting, how it feels to modify the encyclopedia. Give people the opportunity to reconnect with their kid's soul and experiment the wonder of editing without the stress of directly contributing online! Waltercolor (talk) 10:02, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Waltercolor, thanks for this thoughtful note. I'll try to reply to each piece.

For the first point, yes, sometimes Wikipedia has a "name brand recognition" issue, where people don't recognize the nature of the projects and the encyclopedia. For capturing people's attention, some colleagues at Future Audiences are working on fun content discovery projects like the ones you mention. Their efforts, which include games and social media, are designed to use Wikipedia content in fresh ways that link back to the original pages, with the aim of deepening connections to and understanding of Wikipedia while also encouraging new ways of engaging with it.

Design-wise, that's definitely something the Reader Experience team is thinking a lot about! For every feature, we want to make sure the design feels true to Wikipedia while still matching modern user expectations.

For editing, I absolutely love the idea of teaching people to edit with a game! The Editing Team is experimenting with ways to encourage casual readers to start out with small edits, gradually upping the learning curve until they feel comfortable to dive in on their own. We'll pass along the idea of games to them as well.

In terms of future efforts for readers who are not yet editors, am I right in understanding that you'd recommend gamifying the experience to encourage people to the projects? Are there any other features (perhaps things you use on other platforms) that you think would work well on wiki? EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 17:30, 20 November 2025 (UTC)