Wikipedia is the world’s go-to online encyclopaedia. In 2019, they wanted to reach regional readers coming online for the first time through their phones. They chose India, the land of languages, to learn how they would do that.
Wikipedia’s content is created by volunteers or Wikipedians. Since there were no regional language Wikipedians, there was no regional language content. And because there was no regional language content, there were no readers.
Since new readers enjoyed TikTok and Instagram, we created a sample Wiki page with a mix of rich media and long form content. Through user research, we found that readers spent 90% of total time on the page on rich media content.
We converted the facts section into familiar rich-media patterns. This engaged readers and helped create opportunities for them to rabbit hole and read article after article.
Facts in the form of rich media engaged readers and made them stop and read. In addition, translation of short facts into multiple languages was much quicker than translating the complete Wiki article.
Around the 2019 Cricket World Cup, we launched a microsite in English, Hindi and Tamil with over 100 cricket-themed articles in the new visually rich fact format. We tested our hypothesis — that rich media content would engage readers — at scale.
We measured reader engagement and comprehension through quizzes, views, clicks and time spent on the platform. The result was overwhelmingly positive — users answered the quiz correctly and spent time reading multiple articles in one session.
The New Readers product team evolved into Inuka, where insights from our work are still helping deliver mobile-first, multilingual products for emerging markets.
