![]() We all seemed to agree that it was equally important to understand past decisions, and honor the legacy of the interface, as it was to have some sort of vision and courage about how it could be better in the future. On top of all of that, nobody on the team had been around when the current skin, called Vector, was designed and released in 2010. ![]() And despite how simple the website seems, there is a lot of complexity - both in terms of the code, as well as many nuanced workflows and locally customized elements - to learn about. There was a lot of data to gather about who reads Wikipedia and how they use the interface, and in what ways the current site might be perceived as not welcoming by new users from new geographies. There was a lot of history of past proposals, modifications made by individual users, and stalled improvements to dig through. We were hoping to get a rough list of features, and a plan for implementation, to discuss at the conference with volunteers. Part I: Where to begin?Īs our team convened in Prague back in 2019, Wikimania, the annual gathering of Wikimedians, was slated to take place in just a few months. It wasn’t until recently that, with previous obligations and projects wrapped up, the product department was able to prioritize improvements to the desktop site, which was assigned to our team in April 2019. Inevitably some of our products and experiences go longer than we’d like without getting re-evaluated and improved. As part of a nonprofit organization, our team is significantly smaller than product departments at larger commercial technology companies supporting websites of similar capacity. So, while the improvements may seem sudden to many, for others they’ve been a long time coming.Īnd finally, we are a small product department compared with the amount of surface area we are responsible for maintaining (mobile web, desktop web, editing experiences, reading experiences, newcomer experiences, language support, iPhone app, Android app, KaiOS app, etc.). However, these improvements haven’t made their way upstream to the general public. Through user scripts, gadgets, and skins, community members have been modifying the interface on their own to meet their needs. In order to meet our vision of sharing the sum of all knowledge for all people, we recognized that we needed to create an experience that was more inclusive of internet users today and worked to close gaps in access to knowledge.Īnother part of the story is that many of the improvements we are making have already been proposed, and, in some cases, implemented, by individual Wikipedians (and even entire Wikimedia projects). So while the Wikipedia interface was once doing a great job of meeting people’s needs, it has not adapted in response to the transformation we’ve seen over the past decade. The variety of content on Wikipedia has changed, and so have the ways in which people consume information. The size of devices and monitors have changed. The technology that websites are built with has changed, and, with it, design and interaction patterns have changed. ![]() The population of the world that has access to the internet has expanded. Part of the story is that things on the internet have changed over the past ten years. So you may be wondering: How did it come to be that our team decided to implement a series of improvements to Wikipedia? And how can we know if these improvements are indeed improvements, and are worthwhile to make? The Wikipedia reading experience, which was thoughtfully re-designed back in 2010, has worked well for many years. Fast forward to today, over two years later, when we are piloting proposed desktop improvement features on 15 projects, and getting ready for a full rollout later this year. The goal of this session, and several others we had that week, was to prepare for collaborative discussions and workshops at the upcoming Wikimania conference around updating Wikipedia’s interface. While we usually worked remotely (even in pre-COVID times), every few months we would gather in-person to go a bit deeper than our video calls allowed for. In May 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation Web team was sitting in a room on the ground floor of the Green Garden Hotel in Prague, staring at a large image of Wikipedia projected onto the wall. As we look forward to changes to come, we also want to look back and share how this project came to be. In September 2020, we announced a series of desktop improvements coming to Wikipedia.
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