Wikimedia Apps/App Awareness Project

The Communications department of the Wikimedia Foundation is working on an App Awareness Project in 2019–20, with the goal of introducing the Foundation's Wikipedia apps to audiences that would like them, but don't currently know that they exist. There are two Wikipedia apps—one for Android phones, and one for iOS (Apple) phones—and they're free to download and use.

The Foundation conducted two short tests visible on the mobile browser for some readers in the United States who visit the English Wikipedia. The tests ran on two nights—Thursday, Aug 29th and Friday, Aug 30th—for one hour each. The goal of these tests is to determine if Wikipedia readers want the app as an extension of their Wikipedia experience, and to evaluate several options for reaching the audience we think would be most interested in the apps.

The ultimate goal is to bring Wikipedia to new people who aren't familiar with it—in languages and areas of the world where a) there's low awareness of Wikipedia overall, b) the primary way to access the internet is a mobile device, and c) people's experience of the internet has mostly been through apps rather than a mobile browser. The tests that we ran is in one of the regions with the highest awareness of Wikipedia: English Wikipedia in the United States. What we learn in these tests will give us baselines that we can use when we approach areas with lower awareness of Wikipedia.

We'll describe the tests below, as well as the rationale for why we think the apps are useful to our readers and editors. Please feel free to ask questions and make suggestions on the talk page.

Tests

The tests displayed a banner at the top of the Wikipedia article, showing the icon for the app and indicating that it is available on the iOS app store/Google Play store. This is very common for major websites that have apps. The banner will have an X for readers who want to dismiss it.

The first test on Thursday evaluated two designs: a simple banner vs. a larger banner that also adds this copy: "Get the Wikipedia app this Thursday for the quickest way to check a fact, get answers to your questions and information on places nearby. Downloading is easy on your phone and only takes a minute. It's free and ad-free." The simple banner will occupy about a quarter of the mobile screen; the larger banner occupies about half of the screen. We'll be looking at the performance of the two designs, to see whether there's a meaningful difference that would justify taking more of the screen space.

The second test, on Friday, compared the timing of when to show the banner. One group saw the banner on their first pageview, and the second group saw it on their third pageview in a single session. Our hypothesis was that the people who read three pages in the same session are more likely to be Wikipedia enthusiasts, and that the app will be most appealing to those people.

We measured the following things:

Banner: Impressions, Clicks, Dismissals, Banner designs
Download Pages: Device type iOS/Android, Install button clicks & abandons
App Activity: Number of downloads by campaign code
App Engagement: 7-day engagement for those with App Install IDs and attached event campaign IDs

Why apps?

For people who read Wikipedia all the time, the app offers a great reading experience. Students and people researching or working on a project would find these features especially helpful:

Saved pages for offline reading: this is very helpful for people who have limited WiFi access, bad connections, or expensive data plans, as well as people who want to read on the subway or on an airplane flight.

Reading lists: users can put saved pages in personal folders, which is helpful if a person is researching a particular topic, planning a trip, or just bookmarking pages that they want to read (or edit!) later.

For people who love Wikipedia and feel a personal connection with the site, the app offers a persistent presence in their lives—it's one tap away on their home screen when they have a question, or are interested in a subject. It also offers features for people who go "down the rabbit hole" when reading Wikipedia:

Easier navigation: the app loads pages very quickly, and gives people breadcrumbs to move backwards through the pages they've read in this session. There's also a "History" tab that lists all of the pages they've read on the app, so they can easily go back and find that page that they were looking at last week.

Explore feed: when people open the app, they see a feed that has recommended Wikipedia content including current events, popular articles, captivating freely licensed photos, events on this day in history, suggested articles based on their reading history, and more.

Reading themes: with text size adjustment and themes in pure black, dark, sepia or light, they can choose the most pleasant reading experience

The app is also a great experience for basic mobile wikitext editing. The Wikimedia Foundation's mobile web team are currently releasing advanced mobile contribution features, and the app has features that aren't currently available on the mobile web:

Editing wikitext with syntax highlighting: when someone is editing a page, the iOS app highlights the wiki code in separate colors, to make it easier to tell the difference between article text, links and templates or other code. The mobile website doesn't have this.

Micro-contributions: the apps offer helpful tasks that improve the encyclopedia, which are small enough to do easily on a mobile device. Both apps have "short description" editing, which allows people to change the descriptive text that appears under the title on pages and in search results. Android is experimenting with other micro-contributions tasks that will help devoted Wikipedia readers transition to making simple contributions, both as a helpful contribution in itself, as well as a stepping stone to becoming an active contributor on the projects.