Wikimedia Apps/Team/Wikipedia Year in Review/2025 Year in Review

Summary

The 2025 Edition of Wikipedia Year in Review is in progess with the Mobile Apps team! With learnings in hand from the first two experimental versions on the iOS App in 2024 , we plan to improve the feature on iOS, and bring the Year in Review to Android for the first time.

We'll complete 2 A/B tests as we release the feature. On Android we'll test offering a custom reading list related to Year in Review . On iOS, we'll test offering personalized reading insights to logged-out users .

A video demo of the iOS Year in Review feature in 2025 with sample data

A video demo of the Android Year in Review feature in 2025 with sample data Date

What did we learn from last year?

After reviewing our survey responses from 2024, we saw multiple opportunities to improve the feature. Above all, we learned that we needed to invest in more personalized insights. 60% of survey text responses were asking for more personalization. Respondents had so many ideas for what could be included in the year in review, but 3 requests came up the most:

Show reading history by topic, category, or location
Add more about articles read, most-read article, and rabbit holes
Total the time spent on articles, or in the app

Readers also requested other improvements:

Provide a shareable summary slide
Present a reading list of articles from their year at the end
Integrate their personalized insights with overall insights about everyone else
Receive their Year in Review earlier, in December
Include graphs or charts, visualizations for rabbit holes or knowledge journeys
Add more detailed in-app donation stats
Improve editing stats so they cover the entire year / more than 500+ edits.
Add additional editing insights
- A list of articles they edited
- Edits by Edit tags like minor, suggested edits - could show a breakdown of types of edits
- New pages created
- Time of the day or day of the week for Editing
Show which articles they visited that are more niche or lesser read
Show insights by language for Multilingual readers and editors

Feature Requirements

Taking into consideration what we learned in the last iteration, we have the following updated feature requirements:

Add Reading history by category, or mention a few categories they’ve read articles under
Add Most visited article, or which articles they visited multiple times.
Add articles read by geography (You read X articles about Canada)
Add Total time spent reading, and article(s) with the most time spent reading
Allow users to share a summary of the entire review
Prompt users to log in before they begin the flow
If users are logged-in they should receive the personalized Year in Review slide and fall back to collective slides when they do not have enough editing or reading data depending on if they have EN wiki as their primary language or not
If users are logged-out they should receive the collective Year in Review slide depending on if they have EN wiki as their primary language or not
Release date on December 1, 2025

How we'll measure success

We'll have slight variations in what we look at for the iOS App vs the Android App, because the iOS app has a previous version to compare against.

Validation

KR 1.1 - 5% increase in year-over-year donations
KR 1.2 - 5% increase in return rate for engaged users compared to baseline of 77%.

Guardrails

GR 2.1 - Fewer than 50% of feedback about the donation aspects are negative
GR 2.2 - At least a 80% of users rate the feature as satisfactory or neutral
GR 2.3 - More than 50% of active app users during the time period see the Year in Review prompt

Curiosities

CR 3.1 What were the main themes in the user feedback? Did we see a decrease in requests for personalization from 2024?
CR 3.2 Of those who saw the log-in prompt, how many successfully viewed their personalized Year in Review after?
CR 3.3 How do the donations received through Year in Review differ from other app menu donations, and banner donations? Average gift, share of new donors
CR 3.4 What was the overall donation rate, and which slide had the highest donation rate?
CR 3.5 How many people shared their highlights?

Designs

Sample slides from the iOS App

Initial entry point
Log in for personalization prompt
You spent X hours reading X articles
We spent X hours reading
Your top articles
Users viewed articles X times
Top interesting categories
You had clear reading patterns
You saved X articles
Articles you read were closest to
You edited X times
Edit views X times
New app icon unlocked for you
Social share screen

Sample slides from the Android App

Initial entry point
Log in for personalization prompt
Spent X hours reading
You spent X minutes reading X articles
App users viewed articles X times
Your top articles
Your reading patterns
Most interesting categories
You saved X articles
Articles you read were closest to
You edited X times
Edit views
New app icon unlocked
Social share

How to follow along

For Year in Review 2025, we have created phabricator epics for each app:

Android: T404267
iOS: T382442

We encourage your collaboration there or on our Talk Page. There will also be periodic updates to this page as we make progress with this feature each year.

How does this work fit into the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan?

Under the Wikimedia Foundation's Infrastructure Goal, and within the group of objectives focused on Wiki Experiences, is an objective related to improving the experience of consumers:

Wiki Experiences 3: Consumer experience Objective: Readers from multiple generations engage, and stay engaged, with Wikipedia, leading to measurable increases in retention and donation activity

Wiki Experiences 3.2 Key Result: Increase the number of donations through non-banner or email methods by 5% YoY per platform through product interventions that foster deeper connections and reduce friction for donors by the end of Q2.

Hypothesis	Timeline	Phabricator epic	Status
Wiki Experiences 3.2.1 If we collaborate with fundraising we will develop more engaging, integrated and personalized donor slides in the iOS Year in Review as measured through user testing. This will be followed up with a hypothesis in Q2 to assess if the improved Year-in-Review saw 5% more donations than 2024’s Year in Review.	1 July 2025 – 30 September 2025	T382442	Completed
Wiki Experiences 3.2.5 If we introduce a Year in Review feature on Android that highlights user impact and includes integrated donor messaging, we’ll drive new donation behavior—and we’ll see a 5% increase in app menu compared to 2024.	11 October 2025 – 31 December 2025	T404267	In progress
Wiki Experiences 3.2.6 If we make the donor slides in the iOS Year in Review, more integrated, and personalized, we’ll see a 5% increase in donations compared to 2024.	11 October 2025 – 31 December 2025	T382442	In progress

Several Wikimedia Foundation teams are committed to working on projects under the WE3.3 Key Result: Draft Hypotheses.

Wiki Experiences 3.3 Key Result: Demonstrate a practically significant increase in logged-in reader retention, as measured through A/B testing of one feature per platform, by the end of Q2 FY2025-26.

Hypothesis	Timeline	Phabricator epic	Status
Wiki Experiences 3.3.1 If we add low to medium effort personalized elements requested by iOS users in 2024 to 2025’s Year-in-Review, we will see a 3% increase in satisfaction compared to last year, as measured through usability testing or beta testing	1 July 2025 – 30 September 2025	T382442	Completed
Wiki Experiences 3.3.9 If we release Year in Review on Android and A/B test offering engaged users a reward to save a custom reading list, we will see a 1% increase in overall app retention rate amongst readers offered the reward compared to those who were not.	11 October 2025 – 31 December 2025	T404267 Experiment details: Year in Review Reading List Experiment	In progress
Wiki Experiences 3.3.10 If we A/B test requiring an account to view the personalized reading insights of Year in Review, we’ll see a 1% increase in overall retention rate for users that were required to have an account, compared to those that were not.	11 October 2025 – 31 December 2025	T382442 Experiment details: Personalization for logged-out users	In progress

Several Wikimedia Foundation teams are committed to working on projects under the WE3.3 Key Result: Draft Hypotheses.

Wikimedia Foundation teams are approaching annual planning more iteratively this year, so rather than committing to larger year-long projects, this hypothesis is fairly narrow in scope. This should allow us to learn from a brief experiment and deliver value in smaller increments throughout the year, while also ensuring we have the flexibility to pivot as we learn.

Results

After the feature was removed from the app in February, a more extensive analysis was done on the Year in Review feature as a whole.

Evaluation of Key results

Retention & Return rate: Target was a 5% increase over the 2024 iOS baseline of 77%.
- Both Android and iOS achieved an 86% return rate, a 12% increase over the prior year baseline. Note: we intentionally used an older metric of return rate, to enable Year over Year comparisons.
- Overall app retention: iOS two-day retention increased 23% year-over-year (37% to 46%). Android two-day retention increased 2% year-over-year. This increase cannot be attributed to Year in Review, but it's a positive directional movement for retention.
- iOS personalization AB test: Showing personalization to logged-out users resulted in a 2% increase in overall app retention.
- Android reading list AB test: Offering a post-review reading list resulted in a non-statistically significant 0.1% increase in overall app retention.

Account creation:
- On iOS, 43% of all new accounts during the period were registered through Year in Review. On Android, 58% of all new accounts were registered through Year in Review.
- Comparing December 2025 with December 2024, Android account creations increased by 116% and iOS has increased by 166% year over year. Note: the previous iOS Year in Review released in January 2025.
- Both apps have shown the share of logged-in users increase to over 6% after the release of Year in Review. Previously, the share of logged-in users hovered around 4-5%.
- On iOS, we saw that requiring an account to view personalization increased the share of logged-in users by 50%. (12% in control vs 8% in variant)

User satisfaction & Feedback: Target was at least 80% rating the feature satisfactory or neutral.
- 100K iOS users and 80K Android users completed the in-feature survey. 96% of respondents on iOS were neutral or satisfied and 95% on Android.
- On iOS, showing logged-out users personalization resulted in a 3% increase in satisfaction compared to the logged-out control group.
- Requests for more personalization declined from 60% of iOS survey comments in 2024 to 33% in 2025, indicating the improvements addressed user needs.
- A few of the most commonly mentioned feature requests were:
  - More statistics / personalization: users continue to ask for more analytics on searches, reading patterns, topics, categories.
  - Interactive/immersive design: requests for more creative designs, pictures, graphics, quizzes and interactive elements.
  - Cross-platform support: requests for their reading on other devices or on the website to be counted when they read while logged in, asking for the ability to opt-into the tracking.
  - Improved translation: requests for the feature to be completely translated
  - Improved sharing: options to share their review with links to the articles, add their user name

Donations: 5% year-over-year increase target was met.
- iOS donations increased 1320% year-over-year (3,000 donations, vs. 216 donations, in 2024).
  - A big part of this was the iOS app's A/B test to show personalization to logged out users, which resulted in a 327% lift in donation rate, up to 1.1% compared to last year’s 0.2%.
- Android had a strong first year, receiving 1,400 donations. The donations/engaged users rate of 0.4% was higher than what iOS saw in 2024 at 0.2%.
- User feedback about the feature’s donation aspects was not overly negative: on Android, 1.3% of all feedback received mentioned donations. Of those 34 comments, only 26% had a negative sentiment. Themes in the feedback included
  - I already donate / please link my existing donation
  - Request for more donation statistics / wanting contributions recognized
  - Wikipedia doesn’t need donations
  - Motivated them to donate
  - Can’t / unable to donate

Learnings

Showing personalization to logged-out users dramatically improved donation rate, as well as retention, and satisfaction, leading to a big shift in outcomes for the feature overall because logged-out users are 95% of users. (As indicated by results from the iOS A/B Test)
- Because of this, any future iteration of the feature on apps will offer partial personalization to logged-out users while requiring an account to unlock deeper insights, in order to capture both the engagement lift from personalization and the account creation motivation.
Requiring an account to view personalized Year in Review makes it a powerful driver of account creation, with both apps seeing around half of all accounts coming from the feature during the time period, and 100%+ year-over-year increases. Requiring an account increases the share of logged-in users substantially, and this is beneficial long-term because logged-in users are still the segment with the highest retention rate.
Year in Review has strong potential to increase the visibility and brand awareness for Wikipedia and the Mobile Apps: the feature generated significantly more media and social engagement in 2025 than 2024, including coverage from The Verge, Vice, and PC Mag, and over 100 social media mentions.
Year in Review has the potential to drive long-term retention. Based on user quotes, some users are beginning to think of Year in Review as a reason to keep reading and using the app:
- I'm glad you added this feature. I'm looking forward to next year's already
- I absolutely adored this little feature, excited for next year!
- great looking forward to next to year
Logged-in users expect, or would like to opt in to cross-platform insights for donations and reading. Donors want their recurring donations and donations from other platforms to be recognized automatically. We also heard requests for the Year in Review to cover all reading that they did while logged-in across devices.