Show recommended articles on Wikipedia Main page on desktop & mobile web, not just in app (Community Wishlist/W505)

Description

The Wikipedia app now allows users to specify some or many articles they're interested in and then receive daily or weekly recommended articles. This is not possible on desktop.

More interesting Main page

Furthermore, the main page is boring and not engaging.
There is only a very small chance the user is interested in what happens to be interested in the daily Featured Article and it's just 1; the DIYs are mostly meaningless mundane trivia; Featured Pictures are nothing of importance to society and not really educational but just aesthetically pleasing which is a type of photos people see usually more than enough online already (and just 1); On This Day is an arbitrary more or less boring selection of events that happen to have occurred on the same day; the In the news tile is interesting but gets changed just very rarely. Adding recommended articles can make the Main page more interesting and get more people to visit the site, and even regularly so.

Interesting articles

For logged out users, the recommendations could be based on the articles the user has read. Registered users could select either specific interests and/or articles OR have it based on their edit history. Alternatively, logged in users could just disable the tile.

Incentive to sign up

Additionally, having a tile of recommended articles is a further incentive for people to sign up or for users to log in if they already have an account. (They could be told about this feature as a reason to sign up and one could also show this info to users if and after they clicked on many recommended articles.)

Increases contributions & boosts discovery

It also makes people learn new things they didn't know and discover articles which they could potentially improve, thereby possibly increasing contributions / new contributors. There's many articles people are interested in or would benefit from that they didn't think of could exist or where they didn't notice the wikilink (or misunderstood it or just didn't click it because at the time they didn't have the time) or articles where they didn't yet read a very related article.

This would greatly boost discovery and depending on how well it's customizable and/or improving the personalization and whether there is a full-window-sized page of recommended articles (each with eg stats, intro, image, metadata, integration with audio versions of articles, subclasses, etc etc) this could substantially increase user engagement, stay on the site / reads, contributions, etc and could also get page-reads to for example relatively new articles and interesting articles with low reads. For the latter, there could e.g. be subclasses of recommendations like 'Your underrated article of the day' (showing an article with lots of pages linking to it but low pageviews) or 'Your new article of the day' (showing an article at least 15 days but at most 100 days old) etc.

Social media-like discovery/fun explore mode

Note that it's impactful to offer users something to scroll / swipe / glance through without proactively looking for things. People don't go on social media apps like Instagram and then enter something very specific in the search to find more content like it – they browse through a feed that's adjusted to their interests which is fun because you can start right away, don't need to think of sth specific beforehand, is a wild mix, you can browse through just for 10 seconds and then do sth else or resume any time, allows you to discover entirely new things not things related to things you already have in mind, is not so cognitively exhausting, etc.

Value of desktop & mobile web vs just desktop

For me, the recommended articles are mostly useful on mobile in the native app because I have more than enough things to read and do on desktop already but like reading or exploring around things just out of curiosity and ideally not so complex on the go and rarely at other times when I feel like I need sth like a pause (like mind-wandering similar to swiping social media videos).

Only a small fraction of users (contributors & readers) use the Wikipedia app in terms of Main page clicks/reads – most are using either desktop or mobile Web so it would be great if the feature that's already there was expanded to also cover desktop & mobile Web.

Related wishes

W384: A 'Because You Read and recently edited a lot / updated' tile in the Wikipedia app
W102: Add Wikipedia Mobile App’s Reading Lists to the Website
W506: Discovery feed in Wikipedia app similar to social media apps (incl article segments, vids, …)

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request