By Olga Tichonova Trying to find a job during the peak of the pandemic as a junior UX designer was a grueling process, but after months of applying, I was given the opportunity to start a 9-month internship at the Wikimedia Foundation. There are a limited number of junior design…

How customization can lead to inclusion on Wikipedia. — By Robin Schoenbaechler & Jazmin Tanner Over the past year, the Wikimedia Foundation Android team has focused on improving the communications experience in the Wikipedia Android app. Asynchronous collaboration is a core component of the Wikipedia editing experience, and the lower the entry barrier to editing, the more diverse the…

How we used variant testing in designs for new editors on Wikipedia — By Rita Ho As hinted at in the name, the purpose of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth team is to grow the number of new people who come and make a first edit on Wikipedia, and to keep more of them around (a.k.a. “editor retention”). There is an element of teaching…

By Aishwarya Vardhana What is Wikifunctions Wikifunctions will be a collaboratively edited multilingual library of functions. It will be the first platform The Wikimedia Foundation launches since Wikidata in 2012, and part of a bigger vision towards an Abstract Wikipedia, which you can read about at Abstract Wikipedia on meta-wiki. A function and its parts If you’re not…

By Jess Klein Prologue On the discussion page about Nellie Bly’s article, communication isn’t the easiest in normal circumstances. You have to hunt for, and then decipher, little clues scattered around the page to initiate a conversation, and then navigate a confusing interface with seemingly-arcane glyphs to orient yourself in the…

By Daisy Chen As the Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth and Editing teams were respectively making plans and progress on Newcomer features and Talk Pages in recent quarters, the teams were curious about where and how wiki users are communicating with one another, and how mentorship manifests within the communication ecosystem. …

by Robin Schoenbaechler, Carolyn Li-Madeo, Sudhanshu Gautam and Volker Eckl Designing for mobile apps presents unique challenges and opportunities compared to traditional websites. Mobile apps run natively on a device and have access to system resources that are harder to access within a web based architecture. …

Balancing the needs of patrollers and unregistered editors on the wikis. — By Prateek Saxena On most Wikipedias, you don’t need an account to make an edit. While there are benefits to making an account — such as a single place to see all communications, or a place to store articles that you’re interested in — there is no requirement to make…