Jump to content

Wikipedia.org Portal brainstorming ideas for future

From mediawiki.org

The ideas presented here were discussed during an informal brainstorming session about future work for the Wikipedia.org portal; held on April 20, 2016. Additional thoughts and ideas are always welcome!

Agenda:

[edit]
  1. How do we feel about the work that we've committed to this quarter?
  2. What do we think needs to be worked on as a close follow-on into next quarter?
  3. How do we see the Portal evolving over the next year?

Ideas for the Portal:

[edit]
  • display news content from other wikis
  • suggest interesting topics ("I want to see most read articles in [category]")
  • social trending - display latest 3 (tweets, tumblr, instagram, etc) posts with #wikipedia
  • social sharing - make it easy for folks to share content presented on the portal
  • picture of the day
  • breaking news articles ("what's happening right now in [country]?")
  • work with fundraising to figure out a way to use the portal for donations
    • (not all the time, timely campaigns?)
  • display content relevant for our best guess of the location the user is browsing from
  • Search for 'images' or 'books' or 'news'
    • tabbed search results by project? Wikipedia | Commons | Wikivoyage | etc..
  • Encourage visitors to edit
    • or how to become an editor
    • put edit buttons on all the things!
  • use iOS app "feeds" feature for inspiration
  • Allow users to customize the feeds
    • default should be really simple, but customizing would increase the likelihood that I would come back regularly
    • not having ads helps here.
  • Display search results on the portal itself
    • search results - shown on the portal page (not immediately move to a different search page)?
  • add in something for editors/contributors?
  • Portal searches could take users to an experimental UI for wp
  • maybe add in something in search results to go to the article in edit mode

Ideas for UX work - not on the Portal:

[edit]
  • type-ahead on wiki
  • metadata in search results on wiki
  • language detection while typing in a search box
  • Making the Go button behave without surprises
  • Present search results more attractively
  • improve commons searching

Needs for the Portal:

[edit]

Find out why users come to the Portal and don't do anything.

  • Surveys:
    • talk with users to ask how/why they use the Portal
    • try to communicate with those users that bounce from the portal page and discuss why they bounce
  • Analytics from A/B tests:
    • will tell us a lot!