A tile for the Current events portal in the Wikipedia app (Community Wishlist/W305)

Description

The Wikipedia app is not very engaging. The home feed is a great starting point but there is little change to it (even the article recommendations often stay unchanged for long times, the In the news items only get updated very slowly, top articles of the day get updated just once a day and apparently are limited to the top 10, it's just one Article of the Day, etc).

The current events portal contains content that is recent, interesting, relevant, and the kind of content people generally find engaging. Moreover, many people are interested in reading the news as evidenced by many people having news apps installed. Humans are naturally interested in things like news and things that are currently ongoing or very recent. There's lots of new meaningful relevant content for every day in that portal.

I'm proposing a new tile for Current event portal contents in the Wikipedia app. It would show a small tile with the upper part of the day's contents with a button to expand it to show the full day as shown in the image. There at the bottom there is a button to show the prior day.

It could be disabled by default. A prompt to show the tile could be shown on a 'Show more' button underneath or in the last slide of the In the news tile – this would be useful so that users discover this feature if it's not enabled by default. The full day is shown within the feed. Making it show a prior day could show it beneath the day or swap out the tile (one could also enable swiping through the days).

It would lead to people using the app more frequently and maybe many would even install the app for this feature. It also draws some attention to Wikipedia articles relating to and in some cases about current events which integrate lots of different information and still not widely read.

There are further benefits or points to add here. For example, the mobile Web version of the portal is hard to use because the indentation makes the text very small and one first needs to open the webpage without it being part of a native app feed. Furthermore, I prefer reading about current events via Wikipedia articles instead of just nonintegrative individual news articles. Nieman Journalism Lab writes When something big happens in the world, some Wikipedian will start an article — and within minutes, editors will descend on it, using news articles as raw material to construct something encyclopedic.

The main benefit is that readers start to find the Wikipedia app engaging and use it again and again in their smartphone routines.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request