Discovery feed in Wikipedia app similar to social media apps (incl article segments, vids, …) (Community Wishlist/W506)
This could make the app much more interesting and make more people install it and a larger fraction of people who have it installed to use it regularly or at least more often.
It could then be used for roaming around discovering new things, where one can just swipe near-endlessly with bite-sized pieces at a time:
The feed could contain…
- Articles of interest to the user (based on selected interests and/or selected categories&WikiProjects&articles and/or read history) in the form of lead segments (not just title!) and image (probably via W505: Show recommended articles on Wikipedia Main page on desktop & mobile web, not just in app)
- Article sections of interest to the user in the form of lead text segments (incl. image if available; sections could maybe be identified via section links such as via See alsos from similar articles that were found to be likely interesting to the user)
- Interesting facts from articles of interest to the user (needs work on how to identify such relevant sentences/paragraphs)
- Talk page threads (section title and first part of the text; even old ones if not marked as solved; could use the user's watchlist if signed in to show talk page threads the user has not yet seen [= section was created at unseen diff or was created before the user started to watch the article])
- Short videos of summaries of linked talks or research papers about Wikimedia (note that one could enable the user to customize the feed to e.g. exclude all videos)
- Other videos about Wikimedia (e.g. from c:Category:Wikimedia videos by language with title or about Wikimedia tools demos like unknown but useful userscripts)
- 'Hot' articles / articles about current topics & events (largely via W384: A 'Because You Read and recently edited a lot / updated' tile in the Wikipedia app)
- DYKs about articles of interest to the user
- Brief introductory info about meta places and tools. For example, short text with screenshot about en:Wikipedia:Task Center
- New/stub articles and other subclasses/types of articles the user is likely interested in (always with part of the intro)
- More things over time
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(here 'Science' was selected as a topic of interest; one can also specify other simple English Wikipedia categories)
Note that one could also have a viewmode where there's just one article/video/… at a time on the screen until one swipes downward
A key concept here is that it's a mix of quite different content. Also, nothing gets marked as seen when scroll-swiping over it.
There are various ways this could be improved further that are partly also relevant to existing features and other wishes, such as adding a button 'Add to interests' to articles so instead of the read-history, it just uses those articles that the user specified to be interested in / to want recommendations to be based on. One could also consider using these in recommender systems to show some articles in the feed that lots of people with similar interests as the users have added to their interests. One way to use this feed is just for discovery where users add lots of things to their bookmarks and then go over these bookmarks to e.g. read the full article lead (or full article), learn more about that tool, etc at another time.
The current Wikipedia app's feed is not very engaging. Things change rarely (such as InTheNews items) and there's just very few recommended articles (phab:T378093) which aren't really embedded in a feed and don't show the lead.
- Edit: shortly after I made this reddit users posted "Someone made a version of Wikipedia that you can doomscroll" (xikipedia.org) on r/InternetIsBeautiful here where it got over 900 upvotes and lots of positive feedback (nearly no negative) like This is so dangerous. I'm going to get lost in it. or Goddamn this makes pretty clear the awful power of the infinite scroll layout, compared to how we normally consume WP.. A user there also asked for such a feature be added to the app. Note: I didn't see that post before I created this wish but I think I saw that website long ago but found it to be a nice idea that didn't work well in practice (it works a bit better now) and forgot about it.
This isn't meant as an editing tool or for readers who already know what exactly they'd like to read about – it's for doing a random 15 minute social media like scrolling spree while e.g. in the train/metro/commute/lunch-break/… that isn't too cognitively exhausting, fun, and has some interesting facts and pages to save for later for example. People are familiar with this kind of app-use and there's a reason for why the broader thing is so successful. It's for example of decisive importance that it's all integrated into one feed (not e.g. different tiles by type) and that one can simply swipe-scroll through it.
Unassigned
Wikipedia readers
- Created: 00:30, 3 February 2026
- Last updated: 15:00, 7 February 2026
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)
This wish currently has 15 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.