Talk:Wikimedia Apps/Team/Explore Feed Refresh

Related Community Wishlist Idea

The following ideas were recently shared in a Community Wishlist (“Discovery feed in Wikipedia app similar to social media apps”). Since they overlap with the goals of the Explore Feed Refresh, adding them here for visibility and consideration: The wish proposes a more integrated, swipe-based discovery feed that could include:

*Articles of interest

*Article sections

*Interesting facts

*Talk page threads Short videos of summaries

*Videos about Wikimedia

*“Hot” or trending articles

*Info about meta places and tools

*New/stub articles

--ARamadan-WMF (talk) 08:19, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for briefly describing and linking the wish here and for letting me know about this mediawiki page. I think there is a very large potential for the type of functionality this seems to be about and it's great to see this!

I'd like to add a few things that aren't in the wish. Probably, early on a topic or challenge or decision-need is how the feed will be added and where.

• It would be useful especially in the apps – which if people become widely aware of this feed functionality could get lots of more installs – but also on mobile Web and desktop where the latter two are important for people to learn about this functionality and try it out
• The app already has a home page with something that could maybe be described as a Explore feed. It would be incautious to just think of what's described as a new component of it added just like the other components of it. It may be best to create a new page for this and let users configure which they want to be their home feed (and use testing & data to see which to make the default). Another idea would be thoroughly overhaul the feed. And a third would be to integrate it into the feed but in a different way and with some changes.
  • In that latter case, one could show the configured tiles like 'Most Read', 'Because You Read', 'Nearby', etc at the top of the home feed but beneath these add the infinitely scrollable feed. With that I mean that beneath these tiles at the top (the user can customize which), the same tiles won't repeat again (not good UX or familiar to users anyway) and instead, one can scroll through the feed (once one scrolled past the top few tiles which could also be made collapsable). If one would like to see prior days, then the tiles at the top could be swiped to the left (or right) (see also phab:T418050).
  • A problem of the current feed is that it has things in separate components. This may be reasonable for the things included there so far but in general such a kind of design is making things unexciting. When it comes to the things I proposed in the wish and this Explore Feed project, it's really really important that things are not compartmentalized but integrated into one diverse feed – the mixture itself is a key thing one wants to have things suspenseful and feel novel and continuously engaging. Can't emphasize this enough and could explain this further if you'd like.
  • …So it would be key that when scrolling through the feed one sees things from diverse topics and versatile types of contents; eg 30 articles with a few DIYs sprinkled in and a video. One could also enable the user to customize which of the content types to show in the feed (ideally even to prioritize with different weights) and it would be totally reasonable and suffice to just show articles of interest in the feed and then slowly add more types over time. Also showing contents like relatively-new articles would be great for improving quality, extending coverage, closing gaps, activating inactive users, and engaging editors. Wikimania talks may be of interest more to highly active editors and get moderately actives ones feel more part of the community, back innovation etc. They all have some benefits, especially that they'd make the feed more versatile and suspenseful and novel.
  • Another advantage is that people are familiar with the scrollable / infinitely scrollable feed. There's reasons for it. Basically please always keep in mind that if things are mentally not exhausting and there's no info overload and the way to use is not more complex than (just scroll down), then this will used massively more when people take a break, during commute, etc. There shouldn't be any further thinking required like 'what is want to see' or 'which type of content do I want to see' or anything like that, basically just a tap on the app and then the option to spend just 4 seconds or 40 minutes on it depending on how the feed goes and just how one likes that moment.

When cards appear outdated, users assume the app itself is neglected or irrelevant. See also wish W305: A tile for the Current events portal in the Wikipedia app and there's further ways (incl more recommended reading tiles). One could also make it easy for users to add articles to their interests and these could be considered not just for which articles to show, if it was used sufficiently by the user one could also show for example when a new section or lots of new content was added relatively recently to one of the articles they're interested in (linking to the section in the feed). This will also make it feel more new and this info on recent or current topics or recent or current changes is what makes things really exciting to lots of people (maybe it doesn't have to be just the interest article itself but also closely related ones). Prototyperspective (talk) 00:06, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the extra details and ideas, @Prototyperspective, I will make sure to pass this to our team so it can be reviewed carefully. ARamadan-WMF (talk) 11:57, 25 February 2026 (UTC)