Future Audiences/Scrollipedia

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The objective of the Future Audiences team for FY25-26 is to, based on insights from experiments that sharpen our understanding of how knowledge is shared and consumed online, provide recommendations on strategic investments for the Wikimedia Foundation to pursue that help our movement serve new audiences in a changing internet. To accomplish this, we are exploring strategies to expand beyond our existing audiences of readers and contributors so we can truly reach everyone in the world as the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge.

Typically, a user of Wikipedia is here to look something specific up, whether it be to find out who an actor is or how much rainfall a certain country experiences per year. At the Future Audiences team, however, we see a strong attraction among new generations of internet users to products that offer serendipitous content discovery, browsing, and curation (such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest). We see that currently, Wikipedia is primarily a search experience, and doesn’t have the browsing and discovery features that are increasingly expected of modern platforms, especially by younger audiences.

Since younger audiences are primarily engaged on mobile devices, in this experiment, we set out to discover how we can offer a useful and engaging browsing/discovery experience of Wikimedia content to this audience.

Overview & Key Facts

How will we investigate content browsing and discovery?

Our aim is to:

1. Build numerous prototypes of potential content discovery and engagement apps,
2. Test these prototypes with limited audiences,
3. Determine, in collaboration with other teams, such as the Apps and Reader Growth team, which features and UX to test with a scaled-up audience,
4. Create a new and separate app based on this feature list that is available for a limited time,
5. Collaborate with our Apps, Reader Growth, and Communications teams on a strategy to invite new users to try out our experience and provide feedback,
6. Iterate based on this feedback, and
7. Ultimately, determine whether to integrate any new features into our current app, or scale/fully productize a new standalone app, based on experimental learnings.

As this work is part of Future Audiences Key Results 2.3, in which we aim to “launch a product off-platform aimed at future audiences' new methods of learning/media consumption and bring it to market through a collaborated product branding and marketing campaign,” this experiment will likely have a longer-than-usual timeline, the details of which will be posted here as we dive deeper into this project.

Why are we investigating content browsing and discovery?

A major reason we have decided to take on this work is centered around content browsing, discovery, and curation, or our current lack of it in a modern fashion. On Wikipedia’s web experience, we see community-curated content on the Wikipedia homepage. Wikipedia’s app experience also involves community-curated content. This approach, however, while human-centered and important, lacks the flexibility to adapt to each user. A study by youth culture agency Archrival revealed that 49% of Gen Z users expect their algorithms to “serve them content/products that they want.” If we want to properly provide Gen Z users with a useful and engaging experience, we must keep up with their expectation that apps will provide tailored content browsing.

In addition, we would like to experiment with new content forms. Wikipedia’s articles are text-based and aim for precision, spread, and depth of knowledge. Forbes reports that in a survey, 43% of Gen Z respondents say they “rarely read or never read for fun.” For Wikipedia content to continue to be informational and accessible, we must explore new formats. Boston Brand Research and Media reports that “seventy percent of 13-17 year-olds prefer getting the majority of their news from videos.” Image and video content dominate on social media, and our current focus on text does not mesh well with modern expectations of visuals.

What approach are we taking to our investigation and why?

To ensure that we are able to deliver the best set of upgrades and new features to new audiences and bring in a new generation of curious and engaged users, we are creating numerous prototypes to test with limited audiences. Each prototype is focused on testing different concepts and has its own set of research questions.

How to stay updated on insights from this experiment

As usual, we will be sharing updates on this and other Future Audiences experiments during our monthly open community calls. Please sign up here if you’d like to be notified for upcoming calls.

If you have any further questions/inputs please get in touch on the talk page!