Background
As we prepare to deploy the 2025 version of Year in Review, we're receiving feedback and noticing things we'd like to change next year. This EPIC is to collect those items and other ideas that arise throughout the 2026 calendar year.
Improvements to existing slides
Design / visuals
- [Usability testing] Make experience more dynamic and immersive through the use of strong full-screen visuals and sound, even.
- [Engineering] Consider Lottie library for animations over gifs
Comparative stats
- [Usability testing] Surface percentile related to viewing a particular category or something smaller, rather than all articles at large
- Only surface collective statistics within the personalized slides when we are comparing personalized data to the collective (such as the "you're in the top 50%" copy)
Time spent reading / Number of articles read
- [Staff testing] How long I spent reading: it would have been nice to have a visual illustration to accompany this page like all others - maybe something that looks like a typical article.
- [Staff feedback] How many editors worked on your top articles? How many editors worked on the articles you read this year?
Top articles
- [Usability testing] Consider using minutes spent reading as the marker for “top” articles rather than amount of times visited
- [Staff testing] Exclude the "main page" from top read articles
- [Staff testing] Exclude non-mainspace pages, main page, or pages that have been edited from "Top article" slide
- Add better filtering for total articles: can we filter it by reading time > 2 minutes or similar? Might make this list more accurate. Same with total number of articles “read”
- [Survey] The ‘articles you read most’ slide should include a count of the number of times I visited the articles.
Reading patterns
Articles saved
- [Usability testing] Clarify what “saving” an article means, which can be confusing for editors.
- [Staff testing] The collective slide for "Saved articles" could inform users how to save an article
- Highlight month with the most articles saved, or reading list they added the most articles to
Categories
- [Staff testing] Make sure categories show diverse interests: Is there a way to collapse categories upwards if they're closely associated so users get more of their niche interests?
- How can we improve categories list so that categories aren't all similar flavors of the same ultimate thing (for me, it was actors). Can we determine if categories are siblings to each other in some categories tree via the API, and only pick one category per parent category?
Geo / Articles you read were closest to:
- [Staff testing] Make the geo slide more interactive!
- Instead of Geo slide, give an interactive or shareable map of all their articles
Editing
- For global contributions slide, highlight the langauge or projects they did the most editing on.
Top-read on English Wikipedia
- [Usability testing] Consider an alternative list of articles to showcase for collective EN users
Highlights / Sharing
- [Survey] Make the collective highlights slide clearer - some folks thought this was their own statistics. Update the text in the share flow so it does not say "My year in review" for logged-out users
- [Staff testing] On the final page - is it possible to explore other phrases other than ‘ we look forward to next year ‘ something punchy and exciting or inviting to continue using - reading / editing.
- Add "Created with the Android Wikipedia app" and "Created with the iOS Wikipedia App" to Year in Review sharing images. When people change the text, there is no indication to others of how they made it
- [Survey] The highlights should match the graphics in the feature
Improvements to overall feature
- Move entry point to Activity tab
- Have empty state for logged-in slide instead of falling back to logged-out slides (If they have no saved articles, show "You had 0 saved articles, here's how to save" instead of collective slide)
- Add "Year in Review" into the App store product page, and a clarification that the app stores local data and leverages it for surfacing insights
- Incorporate article images
- Similar to the Game, give users a splash screen at the end with all the articles mentioned so they can explore them again
- Invite folks to "Calculate" their year in review as the announcement, and if someone says "no thanks", it stays uncalculated
- Let people see their click to see their full history in a list for 2025
New slide/insight ideas
Collective slides:
- Expand Top read in your language (Request for top 15 languages from RDS)
- Add longest ongoing edit streak in your language: https://project-streaks.toolforge.org
- [Survey] Articles on your langauge Wikipedia with the most active talk pages
- Add a video from a contributor that thanks readers for choosing Wikipedia! Partner with Comms to commission one video per language for top 10 app languages
Personalized reading slides:
- Priority [Survey] Hours spent reading on a specific topic, or topics you spent the most time reading about
- Number of games played / average game score / game streak
- Number of weeks you were active out of the year
- Longest rabbit hole followed! We built the support for this but didn't implement https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T388060
- Number of searches, number of links clicked
- Longest reading streak (could be days or weeks that you read at least 1 article)
- The Date you read the most articles, or read the most minutes - Show a preview of what they did that day
- For the month you read the most, show what articles they read
- Most unique articles you read (articles you read with the fewest pageviews)
- Compared to last year: You read X% more articles/minutes compared to last year
- You were in the top % readers in this category
Personalized editing slides:
- Longest editing streak
- Bytes added by you
- Thanks received
- [Survey] Mention a few articles edited
Interactive elements
- Guess which article was your top read
- Of your top read articles, guess which one was the most read by others
- Curate your 2026 reading list based on your 2026 history
- [Survey] Give an interactive or shareable map of all their articles
Other reminders
- Complete design spike in Q3/Q4 for updated slide design
- Identify improvements that will be A/B tested early
- Allow self-reported donor identification for the reward: on Android the donation tracking is not perfect, so many donors may have given but a local value was not stored on their device
- Ensure new feature announcements and other items that depend on the year in review having been "seen" reset for the 2026 version
- Make sure we update user defaults for things like the onboarding, survey, etc
- Have info-icon link to specific documentation for that stat
- Do not display feature announcement on first article view opened from External link
- Ensure toggle stays even after Config is turned off
- T410450: Make sure custom icon from YiR 2025 disappears by end of 2026.
- Make social media plan with Communications: how we'll repost, reply to comments, share, etc.
- Review retro notes
- The 5-day funnel check task T411886 was something new we added for Year in Review. It was really useful for this purpose of finding display bugs, and next year we should do it earlier, after 2 days.