Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Archive/Progress bar

Random proposal ►◄ Archive  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Progress bar

N Already on other teams roadmap

• Problem: A progress bar below the navbar.
• Who would benefit: Readers that wonder "how long is this page", and don't have a scrollbar (or do not want to look at that unaesthetic monstrosity)
• Proposed solution: A beautiful thin aesthetic bar of wikipedian colors, its width being the scroll progress.
• More comments: Also changes colors or stuff with different themes, and has a checkbox in the preferences
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: G.L.Sirius (talk) 09:30, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

Reading progress bars are great for blog posts and news articles, and you see them often on those sort of sites. They're great for the reader to know how much of the article is left, because there is an implicit assumption on those websites that readers will read (or at least skim) the majority of the article's content. With all that said, does that assumption exist on Wikipedia? I don't think it does. I don't think any significant percentage of readers actually reads whole articles. I believe the general user experience is to read the introduction only, maybe the sidebar, and maybe another section of interest. Thus, I don't think a reading progress bar is appropriate on Wikipedia, or any wiki. --//Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 16:40, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

• Perhaps this could be more relevant to Wikibooks than Wikipedia. I believe books on Wikibooks are supposed to be read through. One book there spans over multiple wiki pages, though. --whym (talk) 13:43, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

  I think Wikibooks and Wikisource is more relevant, but there are a lot of long pages that we have to cover. Thingofme (talk) 13:16, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

• With viable alternatives in browsers directly today, I do not think this is worth spending time on. --Izno (talk) 20:57, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

  But Wikibooks, and Wikisources have a lot of books/texts span over multiple pages. Thingofme (talk) 13:18, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

  This is an interesting thought, but I also have my doubts that it will be implemented, since we would want to align the upcoming design plans of the web team, keeping in mind that we put a lot of work into improving the TOC, having it potentially sticky, which can give you an idea about where you are in the page. Try out this browser extension to see some current design prototypes: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Usability_testing/Browser_extension KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 10:41, 21 January 2022 (UTC)