Timeline

A timeline of design and user research by the Wikimedia Foundation.

2024

Wikipedia is an Antidote to Disinformation Literature review highlighting the place of Wikipedia as a key part of the internet information ecosystem, in the fight against disinformation.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, Martin Gerlach, Pablo Aragón, Diego Saez-Trumper, Leila Zia for the Global Advocacy Team

Patroller Work Habits Survey Surveying the contributions and working habits of patrollers, to better guide future efforts to aid this group.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, for the Moderator Tools Team

Current Usage and Future Adoption of Wikifunctions This study generates a comprehensive understanding of how Wikifunctions might successfully integrate into Wikipedia.

Project Lead: Andrew Russell Green and Amin Al Hazwani, for the Abstract Wiki team.

Wikipedia Subscription User research to study the reading and information seeking habits of internet users, and their usage of subscription services, to help inform products that can deliver Wikipedia content in novel formats.

Project Lead: Gabriel Escalante and Purity Waigi, for the Inuka Team.

Cross-Wiki Uploads User interviews of English and Arabic Wiki uploaders were conducted to understand the experience and mindsets of those who use the visual editor upload tool, and what leads them to upload copyrighted material.

Project Lead: Bethany Gerdemann with Eman Yahia for the Structured Content team.

iOS Navigation Refresh Variant testing in English, Arabic, German, and Chinese for a redesign the iOS navigation system with the goal of ensuring a seamless user experience.

Project Lead: Olga Tichonova, with Bethany Gerdemann and Eman Yahia for the Apps team.

Non-Editing Participation Exploring the ways that people read on and off Wikipedia, and the expectations of new Wikipedia account holders for reading features.

Project Lead: Mike Raish and Eman Yahia, for the Core Experiences teams.

MinT (Machine in Translation) Research Project to understand how to better leverage MinT to support more readers and contributors in their aims of accessing, interacting with, and contributing to Wikipedia content, as well as knowledge more generally.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager in collaboration with Pau Giner and Anagram Research.

Edit Check An interview study exploring the WMF Editing team's "Edit Check" tool and its reception among small- and medium-size Wikipedias in sub-Saharan Africa.

Project Lead: Mike Raish, Sandra Abrouk, and the Editing Team.

2023

Commons Impact Metrics Understanding affiliates data and metrics needs in the Commons space.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen for the Data Products team.

Community Configuration Interviews with Wikipedia administrators about the WMF Growth team's "Community Configuration" platform.

Project Lead: Mike Raish for the Growth team.

Wikimedia Preview Wordpress Plugin User research to learn how site owners and site readers use and interact with the Wikimedia Preview, the Wordpress plugin.

Project Lead: Hureo, with Eli Asikin-Garmager, Bethany Gerdemann, and the Inuka Team.

Commons Administrator Interviews Research to understand Commons Administrators workflows, the challenges they face in moderating content, and their ideas for reducing deletions.

Project Lead: Bethany Gerdemann, with the Structured Content team.

Non Editing Participation Report Recommendations based on a series of interviews to discover diverse avenues for user engagement through non-editing participation features.

Project lead: Mike Raish, with YUX and the Core Experiences teams.

Non Editing Participation Literature Review A literature review to identify ways in which users can engage with potential forms of non-editing participation, thereby increasing their interest and involvement in the Wikis.

Project lead: Mike Raish, with YUX and the Core Experiences teams.

Commons Uploader Experience A project to understand the user experience of uploading images to Commons, with the purpose of improving the upload process while reducing deletion requests.

Lead: Claudia Lo, with Bethany Gerdemann, Criba Research and the Structured Content team.

Future Learning Vectors Interviews with educational, short-form video content creators about how, when, and why they use Wikipedia, in order to improve the quality and quantity of Wikipedia content that is disseminated to global audiences through learning-oriented video content.

Project lead: Mike Raish, with Shobha S V and the Core Experiences teams.

IP Masking Prototype Usability Testing Moderated usability tests that explore the functions of an “IP Masking” prototype in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese.

Project lead: Mike Raish with Naoko Sato, and the Growth & Core Experiences teams.

Trust & Wikipedia An experiment to determine how embedding "trust signals" into the Wikipedia desktop interface affects understanding of how Wikipedia works and trust in its information.

Project lead: Mike Raish, with Laura Stigliano and the Web team.

Journey Transitions This project explores what and whether notable moments cause users to deepen and expand their use of and/or contributions to Wikipedia.

Project lead: Daisy Chen with Mike Raish and the Core Experiences product group.

Reading Wikipedia Understanding what readers in diverse language communities think they are doing as they read Wikipedia, their motivations for reading, the navigational structures they perceive and use, and the ways in which they interact with information.

Project lead: Mike Raish with YUX for the Core Experiences product group.

Translatable Pages Developing a better understanding of the challenges users face when creating and updating translatable pages in order to improve the user experience.

Project lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, and the Language Team

Image Suggestions for Article Sections Usability tests for a feature that suggests images to experienced contributors to add to an article section.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with the Structured Content team.

New Page Patrollers An interview series with English Wikipedia New Page Patrollers to develop a shared understanding of how new page patrolling works on the English Wikipedia and to identify potential areas for improvement grounded in today’s patrolling practices.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Moderator Tools team.

Campaign Event Discovery Survey Survey on most common and most effective campaign event discoverability pathways.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo with Bethany Gerdemann and Gregory Onyeahialam, for the Campaigns team.

Incident reporting system Research exploring current harassment reporting workflows and harassment target/responder pain points on Korean and Indonesian wikis.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen. Requestors: Aishwarya Vardhana, Madalina Ana from Trust & Safety team.

Wikistories Early Adopters Research A project about Wikistory adopters, both creators and readers, focusing on their motivations and experiences creating and sharing stories.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager and Claudia Lo

2022

Campaigns Event Registration Page User Testing Usability testing of the campaigns registration feature that enables organizers and participants to register for events on the Wiki platform.

Project Lead: YUX with the Campaigns Team

Momentum: An Empirical Exploration of the Flywheel Research that evaluates the empirical relationships between content, community, and consumption.

Project Lead: Jim Maddock with Michael Raish, Mikhail Popov, Isaac Johnson, and Margeigh Novotny

Wikifunctions: Usability of Bangla Prototype Usability testing of Wikifunctions prototype with Bangla speaking programmers and developers.

Project Lead: UserHub with Aishwarya Vardhana and Daisy Chen

Wikimedia Commons User Interviews and Data A project that combines usage data and in-depth interviews with Commons users to understand the current state of the platform.

Project Lead: Jeff Howard with Jim Maddock and Margeigh Novotny

Newcomer Positive Reinforcement Cross-cultural feedback on approaches to Positive Reinforcement through review of static designs.

Project Lead: Mary Grace Reich with Michael Raish and the Growth team

IP Editing on Japanese Wikipedia An inquiry into why some editors don’t log in and how they might be encouraged to through a comparative study of Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, and Japanese Wikipedias.

Project Lead: Michael Raish and the Growth team

The Future of IP-based Editing A project that investigates the difficulties with moderating anonymous edits and how best to mitigate those issues.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

Templates and Trust-o-meters: Towards a widely deployable indicator of trust in Wikipedia This work identifies three key challenges: 1) empirically determining which metrics from community approaches most impact reader trust; 2) validating indicator placements and designs; and 3) demonstrating that such indicators can both lower trust and increase perceived trust in the system when appropriate.

Project Lead: Andrew Kuznetsov, Margeigh Novotny, Jessica Klein, Diego Saez-Trumper, Aniket Kittur

Section Translation Feedback Survey Learning from the experiences of editors who used Section Translation during a Bengali Wikipedia article quality improvement competition in 2022.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager with the Language team

Special Search Improvements: Arabic User Testing & Spanish User Testing When someone searches on Wikipedia but there isn’t an article matching their search term, they arrive at “special:search,”. This project tests new concepts for this feature with Arabic and Spanish readers.

Project Lead: Mike Raish, Daisy Chen, Sneha Patel, UserTestingArabic, and Criba Research

Event Organizers: A Study in 4 African Countries This exploratory research project focused on organizations in four african countries to learn about the particular challenges faced event organizers and the strategies they have developed to succeed in growing their communities.

Project Lead: YUX with the Campaigns team

Readability on Wikipedia A literature review of the web factors that affect readability on the internet.

Project Lead: Taryn Bipat

HabLatAm A study of the internet habits and preferences of youth across Latin America.

Project Lead: Ana Chang & Eli Asikin-Garmager, with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

Content Moderation in Medium-Sized Wikimedia Projects This project aims to fill knowledge gaps in our understanding of how editors curate and moderate content on Wikimedia projects outside the largest and most well-researched communities.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with Sam Walton and the Moderator Tools pilot team

Section Translation Post-Improvements (Thai Wikipedia) Testing Section Translation brings translation support to mobile device editors, and this project provided usability testing after a number of initial tool improvements and at a time when it was becoming available in a greater number of wikis, including Thai Wikipedia.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with Teak Research and the Language team

Wikistories Indonesia Concept Testing Gathering feedback from Indonesian wiki editor communities on early concepts and designs for WikiStories.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with Ari Natarina.

Wikistories Africa Research (Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa) Understanding how we might expand the Wikimedia audience and exploring ways of providing more gradual engagement and sparking interest in topics before users access denser, long-form formats.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with Qhala Digital Consultancy, the Inuka Team, and Wikistories Team.

2021

Communications and Mentorship Understanding the wiki-related communications ecosystem, both on and off Wiki, that embedded community members employ for their Wiki related work.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with the Growth and Editing teams

Section Translation Entry Points Improving discoverability of translation tools on Wikipedia.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with Pau Giner, Anagram Research, and the Language team

Media Matching Conducted in support of the WMF Structured Data team, Media Matching attempted to identify barriers faced by experienced editors in English, Arabic, and Japanese Wikipedias.

Project Lead: Michael Raish, with the Structured Data team, Community Ambassadors and Project Kobo

Wikimail Harassment An analysis of community initiatives regarding Wikimail abuse over the past five years and general perspectives on harassment.

Project Lead: Jeff Howard

Verifiability on Wikipedia This three-language study provides foundational understanding for how editors work with available resources to meet the standards required for article quality.

Project Lead: Ana Chang, with Sam Walton (WMF), Spiegel Institut, and Wikipedia Library team

Wikifunctions, phases 1 & 2 A study that collects feedback on the function-builder prototype from technical users, nontechnical users, and those from outside of the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Project Lead: Jeff Howard

Digital Spaces // Topical Neighborhoods This project combined conversations with WMF employees and global volunteers with a literature review to support the internal conversation around the Digital Spaces // Topical Neighborhoods proposal.

Project Lead: Michael Raish

Targets of Harassment In order to support the Universal Code of Conduct’s phase 2 drafting committee, the Wikimedia Foundation has conducted a research project focused on experiences of harassment on Wikimedia projects. This took the form of a survey and several in-depth interviews.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

Understanding Perspectives on Digital Education in African Contexts Qualitative research examining the perspectives on the future of education from experts, students, teachers, and parents.

Project Lead: Ana Chang, with AfriqInsights

Section Translation Usability Testing Many Wikipedia contributors edit articles via mobile devices. Section Translation brings translation support to mobile device editors, and this project provided usability testing as the tool became available in the first wiki.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with the Language team

Desktop UI: Table of Contents/Sticky Header This project tests the concept of a sticky header and the table of contents element as a part of a reader-focused desktop interface improvement initiative by the Web team.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with Criba Research, Urika Research, and Monafina F Silitonga

Taxonomy of Harassment A taxonomy of negative social interactions on Wiki projects and a methodology to prioritize those in need of intervention.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

2020

KaiOS App Usability Jiophone users explored the usability of search, navigation, settings, and other features on the Wikipedia KaiOS app.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with Hureo and the Inuka team

Multilingual Editor Experiences in Small Wikis Supporting multilingual editors in small Wikipedias who are leveraging translation to contribute across knowledge and content gaps.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with Anagram Research and the Language team

CheckUser Improvements Past research and Steward feedback surfaced many pain points in the CheckUser extension, the tool used by moderators to reverse vandalism of articles. These are multiple iterative rounds of usability tests of the enhanced tool.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

Patrolling Anonymous Edits A study of how patrollers handle edits by logged-out users, and what pieces of information from IP addresses are necessary for their work in maintaining the overall health and quality of Wikimedia projects.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

Trusted: Signals, Inferences & Indicators The goal of this work is to develop systems for automatically detecting and characterizing the editorial debates behind Wikipedia articles for the purpose of surfacing indications of trustworthiness to the reader. This project is a collaboration between the Wikimedia Foundation and the CMU Human Computer Interaction Institute.

Project Lead: Andrew Kuznetsov of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute, with Margeigh Novotny

Android App Suggested Edits As part of the iterative participant testing and development for the app’s Section Editing feature, this project addresses user difficulties using and understanding the Contributions screens.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with the Android team

Searching on Commons: Structured Data Across Wikimedia The SDAW program has created prototypes that reimagine searching for images on Commons. This project tests usability of prototypes and captures users’ expectations/wants in their search experiences on the wikis.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with the Structured Data Team

Android App Suggested Edits As part of the iterative participant testing and development for the app’s Section Editing feature, this project addresses user difficulties using and understanding the Contributions screens.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with the Android App Team

Interpersonal Communication on Wikipedia This project seeks to understand more about interpersonal communication and coordination within the Wikipedia community, in particular the role of talk pages in creating and maintaining Wikipedia’s content.

Project Lead: Anna Rader

How Do News Organizations Use Wikipedia? This project seeks to understand more about how and why media and news organizations use Wikipedia.

Project Lead: Anna Rader

Content Moderation Explained An overview of how a global community of volunteer moderators determine which contributions to Wikipedia are accepted and rejected.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with Lucy Blackwell

Machine Translation Meets Human Perception The Machine Translation Meets Human Perception (MTMHP) study developed a protocol for evaluating how readers perceive and evaluate machine-translated content - across three different languages, cultural contexts, and content domains.

Project Lead: Michael Raish, with Hureo and Bethany Gerdemann

Content Translation Newcomer Survey TA customizable survey that can be used to more easily, quickly, and reliably collect feedback from a more diverse pool of Content Translation users.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with Pau Giner and Amir E. Aharoni

CheckUser Workflow and Tools CheckUser is a critical tool for moderators in anti-vandalism efforts on Wikipedia. This research surfaces the pain points in the CheckUser workflow and opportunities to improve the tool.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

Readers’ Perceptions of Desktop Wikipedia This study seeks to understand the experience and sentiment of new and casual readers on Wikipedia.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with Hureo and the Readers Web team

Article Section Translation Study An evaluation of new designs for tools that help editors translate article sections and receive translation support on mobile devices.

Project Lead: Eli Asikin-Garmager, with the Language team and Pau Giner

Why Do People Edit Wikipedia? This literature review examines the drivers of engagement and the motivators of sustained involvement in Wikipedia. It provides an overview of academic research on Wikipedia production and editor motivations, highlighting the themes and queries of scholarship in this area.

Project Lead: Anna Rader

2019

Wiki Comparison This initiative established a baseline for comparing key characteristics of 732 wiki projects (number of editors, amount of content, readers, readers by platform, etc).

Project Lead: Neil Shah-Quinn

Microcontributions Study What drives users to make small edits and what is their experience while doing so.

Project Lead: Daisy Chen, with the Android team and Robin Schoenbaechler

Community Health Survey An inquiry into the unique challenges faced by volunteer administrators in conflict resolution situations and what types of resources would be most beneficial to this work.

Project Lead: Michael Raish, with the Anti-Harassment Tools Team

IP Masking Impact Report An examination of how edits by users who have not logged-in effect administrator workflows.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools Team

IP Masking Impact Report A review of best practices in reporting systems for disputes and abuse across different platforms.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools Team

New Page Patrol Content integrity on Wikipedia relies on editors who patrol articles and respond to vandalism. This research brings to light the workflows of editors who patrol on Wikipedia(s) and the tools used in the course of their work.

Project Lead: Jonathan Morgan

Movement Organizers The Movement Organizer Study sought to understand the life cycle of contributors by documenting paths, practices, challenges, and risks faced by successful organizers throughout the Free Knowledge Movement.

Project Lead: Abbey Ripstra, The Community Engagement Team, and Ana Chang of Concept Hatchery

Ethical & Human-Centered AI This project identfies challenges and emerging opportunities to leverage AI technologies to further the mission of Wikimedia.

Project Lead: Jonathan Morgan

Harassment on Arabic Wikipedia This study aimed to establish a baseline understanding of the frequency of harassment, trolling, and threatening communicative practices on Arabic Wikipedia, to explore the effects of these practices on editing and community health, and to guide future investigation and strategic decisions for the Anti-Harassment Tools team.

Project Lead: Mike Raish, with the Anti-Harassment Tools Team

2018

Steward Spambot Workflow An investigation into one of the most common tasks performed by stewards, global locks of suspected spambots that are active across multiple wikis.

Project Lead: Claudia Lo, with the Anti-Harassment Tools team

Augmentation This is a position piece developed by Wikimedia Foundation to frame the potential of machine-in-the-loop technologies in making all the world's knowledge available to all, and to ensure the process to assemble that knowledge is inclusive, balanced and safe.

Project Lead: Wikimedia Foundation, with David Goldberg

2017

New Editor Experiences This study sought to understand the experiences, needs and challenges of new editors on midsize Wikipedias with the goal of learning how best to support and retain them.

Project Lead: Wikimedia Foundation, with Reboot

2016

New Readers This study sought to understand potential Wikimedia readers in countries where access to the internet is quickly growing.

Project Lead: Wikimedia Foundation, with Reboot