Wikimedia Foundation Product & Technology: Improving the User Experience

The 2030 Movement Strategy recommendations set out a blueprint for the growth and evolution of the Wikimedia movement. As the primary owner and maintainer of the technology that powers the wikis, the Wikimedia Foundation has an important role to play in fulfilling these recommendations. In particular, recommendation #2 to Improve User Experience calls on the Foundation’s Product and Technology Department to build and deploy technological improvements that enable collaboration, accessibility, content growth, and volunteer technical contribution across Wikimedia projects and languages. 

Now that the 2023-2024 fiscal year is completed, and as we begin work on this fiscal year’s annual plan, we’re sharing a highlight reel of our recent achievements in developing the products and technology that power our site and movement. From a revamp of the Community Wishlist to new features for events and campaigns, from improvements in moderation tools to a new data center in Brazil, there is much to highlight about the department’s work and its impact for readers and volunteers. 

Reducing the burden on moderators

Inspired by community feedback, a major focus of our work in the last year has been building tools for users with extended rights. We started with the goal of improving four workflows for users with extended rights; by the end of FY23-24, we’ve improved seven. 

Understanding that moderators’ time is valuable, a major focus has been to proactively reduce the burden on volunteer moderators: providing access to automation and customizability, as well as tools which help prevent bad edits before they happen. 

Automoderator

The Moderator Tools team is continuing their work in developing Automoderator, a MediaWiki extension with similar functionality to an anti-vandalism bot. Using modern revert-risk models developed by Wikimedia Research, Automoderator provides a high-level of customizability between wikis and languages. This project improves on previous models, including ORES, which have limited language support and have not been recently trained. 

Being built into MediaWiki, Automoderator reduces complexity and improves ease-of-use in setting-up and maintaining automated moderation. The tool addresses long-standing community needs, making moderation more accessible and freeing up volunteer time and energy for other activities. This is especially impactful for smaller communities who may have fewer technical contributors and would not have had the capacity to develop their own bot. 

Community Configuration

With many new customizable extensions, there exists a need for a place on-wiki where local communities can configure them. To meet this need, the Growth team has been developing and testing Community Configuration, a new extension that creates a dashboard where users with extended rights can configure important on-wiki functionalities. By building a centralized place where communities can customize tools to meet their needs, they are more effectively involved in the development process and WMF teams will be able to more easily integrate new, customizable features. 

UploadWizard

To support the Wikimedia Commons’ community, the Structured Content team has been developing and implementing a number of improvements to UploadWizard. Built on extensive user research, these improvements include various changes both to the “Release” and “Describe” steps in UploadWizard, for example, reorganizing license selection to limit the number of users selecting “own work” when it is not their own work. Clarifying the upload experience for new users is expected to decrease the likelihood of their uploading content that would result in a deletion request, which in turn decreases the moderation burden for the Commons community. 

Research and improvements for the upload process on Wikimedia Commons are still ongoing, with recent work from the Design Research team highlighting common misconceptions among users about the uploading and licensing process, and work is in progress to develop a logo detection tool that can help moderators more easily identify and respond to improperly-uploaded logos. 

Edit Check

For Wikipedia projects, the Editing team is developing Edit Check, a new feature for the visual editor which can help guide newer editors to contribute in line with wikis’ best practices. The first of these checks is References Check, which encourages new users to add citations when they add new content to an article. Testing found that users who were shown the Reference Check were 2.2 times more likely to include a citation in their content edit; this is an increase from 19% to 42.4%! 

Multiple other Edit Checks are being developed or already deployed: Link Check (default on all Wikipedias) warns users from adding links to blocked domains in the visual editor’s link insertion inspector functionality;  Reference reliability (default on all Wikipedias) provides a similar warning for links added using visual editor’s ‘add a citation’ tool; and Paste Check (in development and under community discussion) will help newcomers avoid adding content which may unknowingly be a copyright violation. In all, the Edit Check framework is an important proactive tool to limit the burden on moderators and address potentially-unconstructive edits before they’re made. 

Expanding moderation tools

In addition to proactive moderation features, there is important work in building and improving the tools that volunteer moderators use to respond to unhelpful edits. Working with community members to understand their needs and collaborate on solutions, these projects provide a more approachable introduction for newer moderators while improving functionality for more experienced users. Investments in these tools empower users to better provide for safety and inclusion in their communities. 

Apps Improvements: Edit Patrol & In-App Watchlist

For the Wikipedia app on Android, the Edit Patrol feature was developed, providing an in-app anti-vandalism patrolling interface. This feature is currently available to users with rollback rights, and allows users to switch between language wikis to patrol. Where recent changes patrolling applications have historically been primarily available through desktop, Edit Patrol opens this method of contribution to mobile users directly in the Android app. 

An in-app Watchlist was added to the Wikipedia app on iOS, and was released to all app users last October. This addition came with a set of in-Watchlist actions, such as sharing, rolling back or undoing edits, and sending thanks, as well as new diff pages. The watchlist’s native implementation in the app prioritized accessibility and a mobile-first experience, providing an optimal experience for iOS users while maintaining consistency across platforms. 

Taken together, the updates to the iOS and Android app expand much-needed moderation tools to mobile users, helping new contributors get involved in moderation activities and supporting experienced users’ existing workflows. 

PageTriage improvements

Built from community input and user research, a project by the Moderator Tools team made various improvements to the PageTriage extension to make future maintenance and development of the extension easier. These improvements updated deprecated code, fixed a number of bugs, increased test coverage, and rewrote large parts of the extension in newer and easier-to-maintain frameworks. The project was a showcase of effective community-Foundation collaboration, and the Moderator Tools team now provides code review for the extension. 

Global Account Blocks

As part of ongoing work on Temporary Accounts, new functionality was added that allows global account blocks. This long-requested feature provides an additional global account moderation option for stewards, who previously only had the on/off switch of a global lock. Rather than logging a user out of their account (as with global locks), global blocks act similar to local blocks, preventing editing and related actions while the user remains logged-in. 

Understanding impact, collaboration, and experimentation

Working towards the future requires us to evaluate, iterate, and adapt our processes and develop means to measure the impact of different initiatives and projects. Recently, we’ve developed a number of initiatives towards this end, building a positive trajectory for Wikimedia projects into the future and improving our processes and understanding in the present. 

Commons Impact Metrics

The new Commons Impact Metrics provide much-needed data on the usage of Wikimedia Commons images relating to cultural heritage. This data provides more reliable and interpretable information than previous methods, with its development guided by community feedback. Through monthly data dumps of information for a curated list of GLAM-related Commons categories, cultural institutions can now better quantify and understand the impact of the content they contribute to Wikimedia Commons. Publicizing this data in an accessible way helps current and potential GLAM partners understand the positive and now-measurable impact that their contributions can have. 

CampaignEvents

The CampaignEvents extension, currently deployed on Meta-Wiki and multiple Wikipedias, enables campaign organizers to manage and improve the discoverability of their events within Wikimedia wikis. Starting with Event Registration, the suite of Campaigns tools now includes a global Event List and the team is developing further tools to more effectively connect event organizers and potential participants. Event Registration is integrated with the Program & Events Dashboard and includes a high level of customization to meet organizer needs. 

At its core, the Campaigns tools centralize in MediaWiki what used to be handled by a multitude of third-party applications. Now, a campaign’s on-wiki page and its sign-up page are one and the same, improving ease-of-use both for organizers and participants without sacrificing the features that previous methods provided. 

Talk pages improvements

Talk pages haven’t always been known for their ease-of-use for new users. To this end, the Editing team has developed a number of usability improvements to talk pages as part of a long-running talk pages project. This includes a table of contents that shows the number of comments in a topic, meta-information on the top of the page noting the latest comment, improved heading appearances, and emphasized action (reply, subscribe, new topic) buttons. An analysis of the desktop talk page design changes found that they resulted in a lower revert rate for new users’ talk page edits and an increase in the completion rate of posting messages. In addition to the navigation and usability developments, talk page permalinks have been developed and deployed, which allows users to link to specific comments on talk pages (even if it is archived!). 

Future Audiences Experiments

To maintain the sustainability of Wikimedia’s reader and contributor base long into the future, we need the capacity to try out and evaluate new ideas. The Foundation’s Future Audiences team has a different role than most, experimenting with different strategies to understand how we can maintain and expand our audiences. Currently working on Add a Fact, which investigates a way to speed up the process of adding a new fact to Wikipedia, the team has also experimented with a ChatGPT plugin and a browser extension to search for whether a claim is on Wikipedia. This approach is more akin to research than product development, allowing the team to collect new learnings for potential future development without major investment. 

Improving the reader experience 

In the interest of improving the experience of our users and to better connect readers to Wikimedia projects, we have invested in upgrades to our sites’ design and infrastructure. These investments represent part of our work in continually improving the experience of readers and the options available to editors in displaying and translating Wikimedia content. 

Dark Mode

One of the most requested features for viewing Wikipedia was recently launched: dark mode! The highest-supported Wishlist item in 2023, dark mode improves accessibility and reduces eye strain for readers of Wikimedia projects by providing a low-contrast environment. The feature is available on mobile and desktop, and on all Wikipedias for logged-in users. For non-logged-in users (readers), dark mode is available on a growing number of projects. 

On top of development of dark mode itself, this project involved the collaboration of staff and volunteers to update wiki content and styles to be compatible with dark mode. The main barrier to developing a dark mode in the past has been maintaining an accessible level of contrast between text and its background while keeping colors as-is when they have specific meaning; this is not possible with color-modifying shortcuts, but is possible in the new dark mode. 

The feature was completed as part of a project to improve accessibility for reading and was built with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on color contrast in mind. The team has developed a list of clear recommendations for dark mode compatibility, a color contrast wiki checker tool, and actively works to enable volunteers to improve the color contrast accessibility of content on their wikis. 

Charts

A new task force was formed to build the Chart extension – the successor of the Graph extension, which was disabled in 2023 for security reasons. This new solution will be more secure and user-friendly, addressing readers’ needs while being easier to use for less-technical users. The project, which started in July, aims to develop the extension through the remainder of the calendar year. 

Machine in Translation (MinT)

Users who translate content may have noticed the ongoing work on Machine in Translation (MinT), a machine translation service that supports over 200 languages. Currently used in Content Translation, the Translate extension, and on translatewiki, MinT is used to provide a useful initial translation that human translators can then review and improve. By developing an open-source machine translation tool and integrating it into translation workflows, volunteers are better supported in translating text to their languages and making Wikimedia available for everyone. 

Brazil Data Center

With the opening of a new data center in Brazil, the average time it takes for a reader in the country to load Wikipedia has decreased by one-third of a second. This is a significant improvement for readers in Brazil and is expected to increase the likelihood of return visits to Wikipedia. Before the new data center, loading times in Rio de Janeiro could take as much as twice as long as loading times for someone in New York City. After ten months of work spent preparing, selecting, and setting up the data center, users in the country have faster and more reliable access to Wikimedia content. 

Strengthening shared decision making

With the recent proposal of a Product and Technology Advisory Council and updates to the Community Wishlist process, we are working to bring together varied movement perspectives and promote equity in decision-making, helping to ensure that product and technology decisions are made from an informed perspective. 

Product and Technology Advisory Council

The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) pilot joins technical contributors and Foundation leadership to discuss important topics relating to product and technology strategy, such as the role of interactive content. Rather than directly making decisions, the PTAC is intended to advise the Foundation on strategic opportunities and challenges faced by the movement. With a diverse set of members from the technical community, affiliates, and Wikimedia Foundation staff, this Advisory Council (once formed) will help to represent and engage with stakeholders from across the movement. 

Community Wishlist

A new approach for the Community Wishlist emphasizes the collaborative nature of the process: rather than an annual survey for product ideas, the Wishlist is now always open and geared towards problems we can discuss and solve together. The new process groups wishes into “focus areas” which represent a shared problem, which allows wishlist work to better integrate with annual planning and provide more focused attention and resourcing. Community members vote on these focus areas, which influence the team’s prioritization of work. 

The new Wishlist process (and newcomer-friendly web interface!) provides more space for collaboration with technical volunteers, is open to a broader range of community members, and allows for more focused attention in important problem areas. So far, over 175 wishes have been submitted, and approximately 27% of them were written in a language other than English! 

Keeping the wikis going

The projects highlighted in this post are only part of the picture of the Product & Technology department’s work in maintaining and improving Wikimedia sites and software. Various teams work to ensure that Wikimedia projects keep running, and that the tools the community relies on to create and curate content remain functional. 

We’re continuing to develop software and finding new ways to engage our audiences in the Wikimedia movement, including continued work to support volunteers through Edit Checks, the CampaignEvents extension, Automoderator, the new Community Wishlist, and enabling Community Configuration across more wikis. Follow the department’s upcoming work on its Objectives and Key Results page on Meta-Wiki.

Learn more about the Foundation’s work

• Tech News
• MediaWiki Product Insights monthly reports
• Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin, a twice-monthly newsletter covering highlights of the Foundation’s activities
• Wikimedia Foundation page on Meta-Wiki
• 2024-2025 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan
• Updates from the Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer, Maryana Iskander
• Wikimedia Foundation news