Reading

The Readers teams (Reader Experience and Reader Growth) are in charge of the reading experiences for all the web users of the Wikimedia projects. Reader Experience focuses on enhancing familiar core ways of learning and engagement, while Reader Growth focuses on new ways of learning and engagement. This approach is designed to ensure that our work advances both foundational and transformative user experiences, addressing the evolving needs of our projects and their diverse audiences.

We work on both mobile web and desktop, and are part of the Core Experiences group.

Check out our repository and learn more about:

All reader-focused work was previously housed under one umbrella as Reading Web (archived), which was split in July 2025 to seed these two teams.

Prior to its iteration as the Web team, the team was known Reading Web or Readers Web, and before that (until 2015-ish) Mobile Web. You may still find these names used in the documentation.

Projects

Our work constitutes most of the objective 'Wiki Experiences 3: Consumer Experiences (WE3; owner: Nat).

Our objective is that readers from multiple generations engage, and stay engaged, with Wikipedia, leading to measurable increases in retention and donation activity.

This objective will focus on retaining new readers through innovative content formats, core audiences through strengthening familiar reading experiences, and ensuring long-term sustainability by deepening reader connections and diversifying donations. It will include a continuation of our work into making content easier to discover through new and more experimental features such as AI summaries or personalized rabbit holes. It will also include work on retaining and improving the quality of the reading experience deeper in the reading funnel and on exploring reading curation through reading lists and other non-editing participation. For donors, this work will continue focusing on diversifying revenue sources from within the platform.

The code in the brackets (ie, "WE3") is used in the annual plans, and helps identify and report the projects (key results) and smaller pieces of work for each key result (hypotheses).

Each page below corresponds with one of our projects (key results) and details its associated work.

  • WE3.1 Engaging new audiences (WE3.1; owner: Olga) – achieve a practically significant increase in logged-out reader retention, as measured through A/B testing of one feature per platform.


See also