New Engagement Experiments/PES 1.3.1: Wikipedia insights

Wikipedia Year in Review - 2024 Microsite

Overview

This work is a part of the New Engagement Experiments (PES.1.3) hypothesis in the 23/24 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan. The goal of this project is to showcase the collective impact of Wikipedia and Wikipedia contributors in the last calendar year. This work builds off of the yearly blog post from the communications team that celebrates the top 10 read articles on Wikipedia, and the volunteer developed prototype of a personalized year in review for editing. The microsite for the Wikipedia 2024 Year in Review focuses on ‘collective impact’ statistics and does not include any personalized data.

The site is hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation site and was built in collaboration across Product Design, Brand, Communications, Advancement, RDS  and the Foundation site team. The site features data related to reading metrics from primarily English Wikipedia during the 2024 calendar year with some additional global and country specific metrics also highlighted.

Background

The Wikipedia Year in Review Microsite provides an interactive, visual summary of the top topics and trends on Wikipedia for the past year. Users can explore key statistics, view highlights of popular articles, and learn about the global impact of Wikipedia in 2024. This is designed to give users a sense of connection to the community’s efforts, whether they are readers or contributors.

The work for this project began during the PES 1.3.3 ‘Incubator space’ internal hack event. During the event members of the Product and Tech department worked together to design, build and test explorations of a ‘Wikipedia Year in Review’ microsite. This work was used to inform the work that occurred during PES 1.3.1 and now WE 1.3.4.

Illustrations

Illustrations on the Wikipedia Year in Review Microsite were created by Sharon Park and will be available on Commons in mid-December, 2024.

Animations were created by Sharon Park and Jonathan Djob Nkondo.

Data

• This list was originally published using English Wikipedia data pulled by the Wikimedia Foundation on 22 November 2024. Please check back in early January 2025 for an update that will cover the remainder of the year. All of the pageviews include direct and indirect navigations to the pages in question.
• This list has been screened for false positives with methods including:
  • Cross-referencing the pageviews against the percentage of views they received from desktop devices, as extreme values of less than 2% or more than 80% correlates strongly with spam, botnets, or other concerns. This affected articles like Cleopatra, a long-time false positive that @depthsofwiki reported is a default voice search on Google devices; XXXTentacion; and .xxx.
  • Looking at the number of pageviews that did not have a referrer and removing articles with extremely high values. This impacted a number of articles about large websites, such as Facebook. We suspect that a significant number of the pageviews without referrers are mistakes that occur when viewers are trying to access those websites.

Site hosting

The site is hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation site. Hosting this project on the Wikimedia Foundation site made it possible for the project to have more granular control of dynamic and responsive layouts. Hosting on the Wikimedia Foundation site also enables for more customization of preview images when the site is shared and increased control of SEO optimization, which we hope will enable more people to access the microsite.

The microsite utilizes the Wikimedia Foundation Non-wiki Privacy Policy.

Milestones

Upcoming milestones

January, 2025

• Initial results for success metrics will be compiled and shared on this project page.
• Site will be updated with data inclusive of December 2024.

Completed milestones

December 3, 2024

• Microsite is published on wikimediafoundation.org

Aug 12-16, 2024

• Initial prototypes built during the PES 1.3.3 ‘Incubator space’ internal hack event.

Sep 1, 2024

• New hypothesis created to support this work in the 23/24 fiscal year. PES 1.3.1 is marked as complete.

November 7, 2024

• Initial designs for illustrations and microsite layout are sent to Comms and the wikimediafoundation.org team for review.

Success metrics

Hypothesis: If we provide insights to audiences about their community and their use of Wikipedia over a year, it will stimulate greater connection with Wikipedia – encouraging greater engagement in the form of social sharing, time spent interacting on Wikipedia, or donation.

Success metrics:

• Interactions
  • Page views
  • Time on site / Bounce rate
  • Clicks
• App installs
• Donations
• Shares

Sharing feedback

We invite you to share the Year in Review with friends or on social media.

To share feedback for the Microsite, please use the Discussion tab above.

To share feedback or follow along with progress on the Wikipedia Year in Review on the iOS app, please visit the associate project page.

Related project

• Personalized Wikipedia Year in Review on the iOS app