Journey transitions

Journey Transitions was a 2022-23 Wikimedia Foundation project that explored what and whether notable moments cause users to deepen and expand their use of and/or contributions to Wikipedia. Knowledge of these "notable moments" (specific events or stages, and whether they were immediate or gradual) would then enable the Core Experiences group to prioritize design interventions that could cause users to experience these moments more readily, and potentially become Editors in the process.

Initial hypotheses

The Core Experiences group had two main assumptions about Readers in particular:

That these notable moments or transitions exist for these users, and that they are conscious of them
That being a Reader is a starting point, and 'leveling up' via these motivating moments ultimately results in Readers becoming Editors

Research questions

How would these hypotheses hold up? To evaluate this, it was crucial to learn more about the following:

Could users identify and narrate specific moments, transition points, experiences, and/or phases in their Wikipedia journey that led to a deepening involvement and use of/contributions to Wikipedia?
What distinct phases and transition moments do participants identify in their journeys? What causes or precipitates them?
How are Readers' and Editors' narratives similar and how do they differ? Generally, how are they conceptualizing and describing their experiennces on/of Wikipedia?
What metaphors, framing devices, and other linguistic structures do they use to construct their narratives?
What does it mean to self-identify as an “editor?” A “volunteer?” Do users use the same terminologies used within WMF?
What UI elements are users noticing, understanding, and/or actively engaging with?

Research methodology

We conducted a total of 62 design research interviews with new/casual and experienced Readers and Editors from Arabic, Spanish, and English Wikipedias (spanning 11 countries).

The interviews consisted of two main portions:

The guided user narrative of their Wikipedia journey. A discussion guide was created to help the interview facilitator provide a basic structure for the session (or, alternatively, provide the participant with prompts as needed).
The interface elements identification. We took screenshots of the same articles in the 3 language Wikipedias tested, and isolated them as appropriate (e.g. citation needed superscript). We asked each participant to identify the element, describe its functionality and explain any previous experience(s) observing and/or interacting with the element.

Research findings

Editors

Editors largely provided feedback that corroborates data from previous research projects, namely:

their activity is characterized by a desire for deeper learning, they try things and remain interested, and interact and get involved in myriad ways
they are able to successfully traverse the many (arguably narrow) paths towards editorship, overcoming various obstacles (technical, social, and others)

Two findings of note that stood out:

Language Wikipedia-centric: Editors collectively describe a situation in which the quality and quantity of Arabic and Spanish content on Wikipedia is lacking in comparison with English Wikipedia, and their editing is in part motivated by a desire to improve this content (and by extension improve others' access to this content).
While being an Editor typically connotes a deeper understanding of Wikipedia, it does not always guarantee clear knowledge of how 'everything works':
- One editor ironically mentioned not knowing that anyone could edit
- Another referenced thinking 'a group of experts' added content
- An experienced editor believes that an editor can 'stay alone for years knowing nothing about the Wikipedia community'

Readers

The bulk of the notable findings were from the Readers participants with whom we spoke. Where we assumed there were would possibly be interface-based or behavioral catalysts that could push them into a deeper engagement with Wikipedia, we saw that Readers largely had a flat experience of the platform.

What is a flat experience?

Interactions were transactional. Though interactions still varied in type and breadth, they were still primarily limited to consumption and they would take what they needed in that vignette and leave the site afterwards.
Memorable moments existed, but were largely ephemeral in nature and in impact. Not only did most memorable moments not always spur them towards increased curiosity and deeper involvement, positive ones did not have lasting effect and negative ones did and would often discourage from further discovery.
It is not a clear 'level-up' trajectory that takes Readers into becoming Editors. The current reality is that Readers consume content episodically and rarely level up; however, our interface and Product approach revolve around the Editor mental model and Editor-centric vocabulary, quite possibly trapping Reader potential that is currently limited to a narrow set of possibilities (namely, editing content).

We found that Readers see information as water and Wikipedia as the utility service; many want access to the content with minimal difficulty, but display a lack of interest in learning about how it works (how the content comes to be, how the community interacts behind the scenes).

In contrast, Editors do demonstrate the willingness to explore and understand Wikipedia, somehow cresting the learning curves that exist and eventually make their own contributions to the 'system'.

What's next?

Pragmatic

There are a few steps that would logically follow from this research, including reviewing the detailed findings from this project and from numerous past research endeavors that either directly or indirectly explored Reader behaviors and experiences. Some related projects include Momentum (Flywheel), which performed quantitative analyses to explore the relationship between reader-to-editor conversion, and considering different Reader cohorts, which also took a quantitative approach to the classification of Readers.

Further research following an audit of past research may provide more insight about how much user interface elements actually play a pivotal role in affecting Readers' engagement, interaction, and awareness levels, and how many of them can be influenced through improvements on this front.

Conceptual

We may need to redefine what it means for a Reader to be engaged. For a very long time, we have defined our users within a larger paradigm of editing-as-success; being a Reader is ideally only a transitory status. As a next step, we should attempt to reframe what involvement in the wiki ecosystems looks like, and can look like (especially outside the realm of purely content-editing).

The Growth, Web and Editing teams in collaboration with Design Research are currently working on a project called Non-editing Participation, which hopes to identify ways users engage and interact on similar sites and also explore non-editing interaction mock-ups to provide feedback.

Finally, our users are nuanced. We should take steps toward understanding in more detail these nuances, and how to effectively harness and categorize future research findings and recommendations. The current binary discourse centered on Readers and Editors (with the latter sometimes further delineated into subcategories like moderators and patrollers) is useful certainly in meta-level contexts, but there is utility and institutional need in drilling down in research contexts especially to learn about more specific user segments.

Deliverables

The Journey Transitions high-level findings report and recommendations for next steps.
Additional research project details can be found here.

Team members

Design researchers: Daisy Chen and Michael Raish

Requesting team: Core Experiences Product group comprising Growth, Web, and Editing teams

Project partners:

Other stakeholders/contributors: