Readers/2024 Reader and Donor Experiences
This page will cover some of our plans around reading, readers, and donors during 2024 and 2025. The objective connecting these projects and ideas is: "A new generation of consumers arrives at Wikipedia to discover a preferred destination for discovering, engaging, and building a lasting connection with encyclopedic content."
Background
[edit]We want to give good, convenient access to free knowledge in perpetuity for future generations of readers as well as existing readers. This requires work on our interfaces - providing tools and features that are adapted to the needs of readers so that they can learn freely with little difficulty. It also requires work to ensure that our readers have the information and entry points they need to aid us in our mission by donating.
As the fabric of the internet changes and our communities and readers adapt to new technologies and ways of working, a lot of this work will be about adaptation - ensuring that knowledge is not only available, but also easily discoverable and accessible to all on our platforms. After all, in addition to amassing knowledge, what we really want is for people to be able to discover and truly learn while on our projects.
This approach is part of a broader strategy which explores learning and access to our information from outside of our sites as well. However, to somewhat limit the scope of work just to the platforms we own, we assume that users will land on one of our sites, and our goal is to engage them, encourage content discovery, and potentially inspire donations.
We also anticipate that people will increasingly get Wikipedia content on other sites and apps (like search engines and chatbots), instead of going to Wikipedia directly. If that happens, Wikipedia content will still be important to the world, but it will be harder to raise money from banners on our site. Our financial projections indicated that, for a range of reasons, fundraising online and through banners are unlikely to grow at the same rate as in past years. This means that in order to sustainably support the billions of people across the world who use the Wikimedia projects, we need to experiment with new ways to raise funds. You can learn more about why finding new fundraising pathways matters, on our annual plan page.
Goals
[edit]The goals for this work are:
- Retain existing and new generations of readers and donors.
- Increase usefulness to existing and new generations of readers by making content easier to discover and interact with.
- Work across platforms to adapt our experiences and existing content, so that encyclopedic content can be explored more easily
- Spread donation opportunities more evenly throughout the year, decreasing reliance on single campaigns
Key Results
[edit]The following are the key results we are hoping to achieve as a result of this work:
- Release two curated, accessible, and community-driven browsing and learning experiences to representative wikis, with the goal of increasing the logged-out reader retention of experience users by 5% (WE 3.1)
- 50% increase in the number of donations via touch points outside of the annual banner and email appeals per platform (WE 3.2)
Key Result Context
[edit]3.1 Browsing and Learning Experiences
[edit]This KR focuses on increasing the retention of a new generation of readers on our website, allowing a new generation to build a lasting connection with Wikipedia, by exploring opportunities for readers to more easily discover and learn from content they are interested in. This will include explorations and the development of new curated, personalized, and community-driven browsing and learning experiences (for example, feeds of relevant content, topical content recommendations and suggestions, community-curated content exploration opportunities, etc).
We plan on beginning the fiscal year by experimenting with a series of experiments of browsing experiences to determine which we would like to scale for production use, and on which platform (web, apps, or both). We will then focus on scaling these experiments and testing their efficacy in increasing retention in production environments. Our goal by the end of the year is to launch at least two experiences on representative wikis and to accurately measure a 5% increase in reader retention for readers engaged in these experiences.
To be optimally effective at achieving this KR, we will require the ability to A/B test with logged-out users, as well as instrumentation capable of measuring reader retention. We might also need new APIs or services necessary to present recommendations and other curation mechanisms.
3.2 Donor Experiences
[edit]Our goal is to provide a diversity of revenue sources while recognizing our existing donors. Based on feedback and data, our focus is on increasing the number of donations beyond the methods the Foundation has relied upon in the past, specifically the annual banner appeals. We want to show that by investing in more integrated donor experiences, we can sustain our work and expand our impact by providing an alternative to donors and potential donors that are unresponsive to banner appeals. 50% is an initial estimate based on the decreased visibility of the donate button on Web as a result of Vector 2022, and the increase in the number of donations from FY 2023-2024's pilot project on the Wikipedia apps to enhance donor experiences (50.1% increase in donations). Evaluating this metric by platform will help us understand trends in platforms and if different tactics should be deployed in the future based on a difference in behavior based on platform audience.
Hypotheses
[edit]Hypotheses are the specific things we are doing this quarter to address the associated key results above.
Each hypothesis is an experiment or stage in an experiment we believe will help achieve the key result. Teams make a hypothesis, test it, then iterate on their findings or develop an entirely different new hypothesis. You can think of the hypotheses as bets of the teams’ time–teams make a small bet of a few weeks or a big bet of several months, but the risk-adjusted reward should be commensurate with the time the team puts in. Our hypotheses are meant to be agile and adapt quickly. We may retire, adjust, or start a hypothesis at any point in the quarter. To see the most up-to-date status of a hypothesis and/or to discuss a hypothesis with the team please click the link to its project page.
Key Result 3.1 Hypotheses
[edit]| Hypotheses | Project details | Current Status |
|---|---|---|
| Designing and qualitatively evaluating three proofs of concept focused on building curated, personalized, and community-driven browsing and learning experiences will allow us to estimate the potential for increased reader retention (experiment 1: providing recommended content in search and article contexts, experiment 2: summarizing and simplifying article content, experiment 3: making multitasking easier on wikis | Readers/2024 Reader and Donor Experiences/Content Discovery#Experimenting with browsing and learning experiences (hypothesis 3.1.1) | In Progress |
| If we develop models for remixing content such as a content simplification or summarization that can be hosted and served via our infrastructure (e.g. LiftWing), we will establish the technical direction for work focused on increasing reader retention through new content discovery features. | Readers/2024 Reader and Donor Experiences/Content Discovery#Making content easier to read (hypothesis 3.1.3) | In Progress |
| If we analyze the projected performance impact of hypothesis WE3.1.1 and WE3.1.2 on the Search API, we can scope and address performance and scalability issues before they negatively affect our users. | Readers/2024 Reader and Donor Experiences/Content Discovery#Ensuring our we can provide recommendations for everyone (hypothesis WE 3.1.4 ) | Completed Sept 2024 |
| If we enhance the search field in the Android app to recommend personalized content based on a user's interest and display better results, we will learn if this improves user engagement by observing whether it increases the impression and click-through rate (CTR) of search results by 5% in the experimental group compared to the control group over a 30-day A/B test. This improvement could potentially lead to a 1% increase in the retention of logged out users. | Wikimedia Apps/Team/Android/Recommended Content in Search | In Progress |
Key Result 3.2 Hypotheses
[edit]| Hypotheses | Project details | Current Status |
|---|---|---|
| If we create a wireframes that demonstrates the concept of a badge representing donors championing article(s) of interest, we can learn if there would be community acceptance for a production version of this method for fundraising in the Apps. | Wikimedia Apps/Team/iOS/Fundraising Experiment in the iOS App | In Progress |
| Increasing the prominence of entry points to donations on the logged-out experiences of the Vector web mobile and desktop experience will increase the clickthrough rate of the donate link by 30% YoY | In Progress | |
| If we make the “Donate” button in the iOS App more prominent by making it one click or less away from the main navigation screen, we will learn if discoverability was a barrier to non banner donations. | In Progress |