Community Wishlist/Wishes/Customizable number of 'Because You Read' tiles in the Wikipedia app
Description
The Wikipedia app currently is relatively boring and unengaging, in contrast to the many other apps people use far more. Substantial resources are being spent on experimenting what could be done to discover more content with the mw:Reading/Web/Content Discovery Experiments such as "Display[ing] article recommendations in more prominent locations". However, while such can be useful and there seem to be some positive results, one option is readily available and additionally would make the app much more useful and interesting:
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Please allow the user to customize how many 'Because you read' tiles are shown in the Explore feed (the home feed) of the Wikipedia app. The default setting could be to have this tile be displayed by default in just one tile. Beneath the tile, there could also be some text letting the user know they can change the count of how often the tile is displayed (with an X or OK button to hide this note). Alternatively, one could also just allow the user to swipe the tile left or right to see more article suggestions (the last open article would be remembered so it's displayed at next app-opening and one can see new suggestions by swiping leftward to the right).
The home feed is a great starting point to making the app engaging and actually used (or used for more than just briefly looking up a specific fact) but currently it's largely just unused potential as there is little change to the feed. In the case of the Because you read article recommendations, these often stay unchanged when reopening the app, it's just one article, and one may not be interested in the particular article it picked to show similar articles for so they're often useless/irrelevant/boring.
Moreover, it would be nice if one could click a button to see even more recommendations for the given article. For that, things like links in the lead and the See also section as well as the list-building tool etc could be used (the current method seems to work fairly well so it could just show more items when clicking the button).
I think simply allowing the user to increase the number of these tiles may be a relatively quick to implement solution with substantial impact/benefit.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia
Affected users
Wikipedia app users
Phabricator tasks
Other details
- Created: 12:47, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
- Last updated: 16:04, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)