Wikipedia’s new features to enhance user experience for newcomers

Users will also be encouraged to begin making small adjustments through the landing page, sometimes with suggestions made by a Wikimedia-trained machine learning system.

San Francisco: Wikimedia has introduced new features to Wikipedia for better new user experience.

According to The Verge, the company has announced extra features on a platform-wide level, after being testing them for newcomers since 2019.

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A landing page for new editors is visible to those who are logged into their Wikipedia accounts. A mentor will be chosen for them from a group of more knowledgeable site veterans who can provide guidance.

Users will also be encouraged to begin making small adjustments through the landing page, sometimes with suggestions made by a Wikimedia-trained machine learning system.

“The Wikimedia Foundation was noticing that there were problems with the retention of new editors, meaning that a lot of people would attempt to start editing but fail and not stick around,” Marshall Miller, Group Product Manager of Wikimedia, was quoted as saying.

“It is so hard to edit Wikipedia. There are so many barriers to entry,” he added.

As of right now, 584 people have signed up to mentor new contributors in the global Wikipedia community.

The ‘structured tasks’ option, which includes things like adding relevant photos and cross-wiki links to pages as well as suggested newcomer tasks like copy-editing is now available on Wikimedia.

The new Wikimedia system is designed to provide many of the interface-based benefits, the report said.

Users can see how many pageviews the articles they changed have received in the ‘impact’ area on the newcomers page, to get a feel of the impact they’re having.