Wikipedia.org Portal brainstorming ideas for future

The ideas presented here were discussed during an informal brainstorming session about future work for the Wikipedia.org portal; held on April 20, 2016. Additional thoughts and ideas are always welcome!

Agenda:

1. How do we feel about the work that we've committed to this quarter?
2. What do we think needs to be worked on as a close follow-on into next quarter?
3. How do we see the Portal evolving over the next year?

Ideas for the Portal:

• display news content from other wikis

• suggest interesting topics ("I want to see most read articles in [category]")

• social trending - display latest 3 (tweets, tumblr, instagram, etc) posts with #wikipedia

• social sharing - make it easy for folks to share content presented on the portal

• picture of the day

• breaking news articles ("what's happening right now in [country]?")

• work with fundraising to figure out a way to use the portal for donations
  • (not all the time, timely campaigns?)

• display content relevant for our best guess of the location the user is browsing from

• Search for 'images' or 'books' or 'news'
  • tabbed search results by project? Wikipedia | Commons | Wikivoyage | etc..

• Encourage visitors to edit
  • or how to become an editor
  • put edit buttons on all the things!

• use iOS app "feeds" feature for inspiration

• Allow users to customize the feeds
  • default should be really simple, but customizing would increase the likelihood that I would come back regularly
  • not having ads helps here.

• Display search results on the portal itself
  • search results - shown on the portal page (not immediately move to a different search page)?

• add in something for editors/contributors?

• Portal searches could take users to an experimental UI for wp

• maybe add in something in search results to go to the article in edit mode

Ideas for UX work - not on the Portal:

• type-ahead on wiki

• metadata in search results on wiki

• language detection while typing in a search box

• Making the Go button behave without surprises

• Present search results more attractively

• improve commons searching

Needs for the Portal:

Find out why users come to the Portal and don't do anything.

• Surveys:
  • talk with users to ask how/why they use the Portal
  • try to communicate with those users that bounce from the portal page and discuss why they bounce

• Analytics from A/B tests:
  • will tell us a lot!