The Technical Wishes team is currently working on improving references in Wikipedia.
With this experiment we aim to test the following assumption:
Most readers on desktop who click on a footnote marker do NOT intend to navigate to the reference list. They are satisfied with viewing all the bibliographic information and details in the pop-up/in-line (e.g. Reference Previews).
If the assumption is true, we will:
- Change the behavior when clicking on a footnote to show the Reference Previews pop-up instead of flying users down to the reference list, where there is a high chance that they get disoriented and cannot go back to the spot in the article where they left off.
- Reduce investments in improving the reference list for readers, particulary for sub-referencing.
- Venture into acquiring a deeper understanding of contributor needs towards the reference list.
Audience:
- all readers (logged-in, logged-out, incl. temp accounts, bucket counts )
- desktop only
- on wiki's with Reference Previews turned on:
- large: dewiki, plwiki, frwiki, svwiki, fawiki, huwiki
- small: hiwiki, mywiki, tlwiki, lvwiki, fywiki, hrwiki
- Traffic allocation for all wikis in treatment group: 10%
Duration:
- 1 - 2 weeks
UX for Treatment Group:
Metrics:
see here (internal doc) for metrics
- % of footnote clicks that do not lead to a navigation to the reference list via the pop-up link.
- Reference list visits per page view
- TOC clicks to ‘references’ per page views
DEV Estimation
M