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Product and Tech Progress on the Annual Plan
Part of the content of this post was previously published on Diff.
Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation, together with Wikimedians across the projects, creates an Annual Plan that outlines our priorities for the year ahead. Since July, we've been working under a new plan that puts a strong focus on Product and Technology. In this post, we'll share some highlights of the progress we've made in the first two quarters of the fiscal year 2024–2025.
Wiki Experiences
[edit]In Q1, we released the highly anticipated Dark mode, which had been a longstanding wish shared by many Wikimedians. This feature reduces eye strain for readers by providing a low-contrast reading experience. We have now deployed Dark Mode to over 40 wikis, including for anonymous users.
Another longstanding request was a way for contributors to easily find on-wiki events and communities that interest them. In Q2, this resulted in the expansion of the Collaboration List feature in the Campaign Events extension, which now includes a tab for "Communities". This tab features WikiProjects on the local wiki, as well as links to the WikiProject page and the associated Wikidata item. The Collaboration List was also recently enhanced with more search filters, so people can now search for events by wikis or topics. Additionally, wikis with the CampaignEvents extension enabled can access the Invitation List feature, which was released in Q1. This feature helps organizers identify users who might be interested in their upcoming event or WikiProject, based on their contribution history.
Automoderator is the latest deployment in a suite of tools that volunteer editors can use to fight disinformation while making content moderation more efficient. A substantial number of edits are made to Wikimedia projects which should unambiguously be undone, reverting a page back to its previous state. In the past, patrollers and administrators had to spend a lot of time manually reviewing and reverting these edits. Powered by the new "Revert Risk" machine learning models, Automoderator automatically detects and reverts harmful edits. Between Q1 and Q2, Automoderator was deployed on six new wikis.
In addition to that, AbuseFilter editors and maintainers can now make a CAPTCHA show if a filter matches an edit. This allows communities to quickly respond to spamming by automated bots. In the same spirit of supporting editors on the wikis, the Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, is now available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis.
We have started introducing updates aimed at enhancing the editing experience on the iOS mobile app as part of a broader transition from a reader-focused platform to one that fully supports both reading and editing. Editors on the iOS mobile app have now updated navigation features, which include a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view. Expanding on this effort, the Alternative Text suggested edits feature has now been fully deployed to production on the iOS App for Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French Wikipedias. This feature is designed to help newcomers add alt text to images, aiming to improve accessibility and engagement.
We are also continuing to look for ways to improve the experience for contributors with extended rights on the projects, like stewards. Stewards can now specify if global blocks should prevent account creation. Before this change, all global blocks would prevent account creation. This will allow stewards to reduce the unintended side-effects of global blocks on IP addresses.
To guarantee a more secure and privacy-conscious experience without compromising convenience, we are updating Single User Login, the system that allows users to login on one Wikimedia site and be automatically logged in across all, to ensure compatibility with browser anti-tracking measures and will roll out to all users by the end of March. This will also further improve account security by limiting all authentication to a single domain.
The Foundation launched a series of community conversations with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for the next fiscal year. While current efforts focus on improvements to the UploadWizard that will make it easier for moderators, there are a wide variety of interests and needs across Commons that have been discussed with and across community members in the last few months.
We've resolved a total of 650 volunteer-reported issues in Phabricator in the last 6 months. For instance, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page. We have also resolved bugs in important areas like Add Link, the Android Wikipedia App, and the "Download as PDF" system, among others.
To foster close, ongoing collaboration with community members across WikiExperiences work, the Foundation launched a Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) as a one-year pilot in October 2024. The council brings together technical contributors, affiliates and the Foundation to collaborate on building a more resilient, future-ready technological platform. The Council is charged with making recommendations around product and tech development work over a multi-year horizon to help align to the strategic direction of the Foundation. PTAC has already released its first recommendation.
Future Audiences
[edit]We are responding to volunteer requests to experiment with how new generations of people may read and use Wikipedia content. Our reader experience teams are running six experiments now to help us learn where to invest even more time and attention. To learn more about "free knowledge everywhere" as a potential strategy for multigenerational sustainability, we began an experiment to remix Wikipedia content into short "fun fact" videos and publish them on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube – popular platforms where younger generations like to spend time and learn. Over the course of October 2024 to January 2025, we attained a total of 1.87M views and 1.51M unique users reached via this experiment, indicating that this is an effective strategy to bring Wikipedia knowledge to younger audiences at scale. We are continuing to test different content types and are inviting community members who are active on these platforms to join in and collaborate with us.
These are just a few examples of the progress made in the first two quarters. To learn more, read the full update on Diff.
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