The Wikipedia app now allows users to specify some or many articles they're interested in and then receive daily or weekly recommended articles. This is not possible on desktop. This has been raised on the wishlist.

In FY2627 Q1/Q2, we are running an experiment to give reading recommendations to new account holders on web (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T435396). Users who select interests will receive recommended articles based on those seed interests, while users who do not provide interests will receive general recommendations of high quality articles. We will see whether receiving daily recommended reads on web will affect internal referral rates (indicating that more of the page views in Wikipedia are coming from their activity within the domain rather than coming from external search engines) and user retention. We plan on having results from the experiment to share with the community by the end of Q2 (Dec 2026).

If the experiment is successful, we will look at options to scale the recommended articles to all users on web, or perform further testing based on our learnings.

User story

As a reader I want to discover content related to topics I'm interested in.

Related Objects

Mentioned Here: T435396: [EPIC] DE3.2.2 Give article recommendations based on selected topics of interest to new account holders

Event Timeline

Jdlrobson-WMF created this task.Mar 12 2026, 8:35 PM

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This is something we're very interested in exploring in the new fiscal year! However, due to the web having different sources to pull from for determining which articles to recommend, we'll work on some ideas for what we can ingest! (Possibly, articles previously saved by the user? Or user's giving us topics and categories that they are interested in to generate recommendations?)

HFan-WMF triaged this task as High priority.Apr 12 2026, 3:22 AM

HFan-WMF moved this task from Incoming to Backlog on the Reader Experience Team board.

Jdlrobson-WMF merged a task: T394569: List suggestions for readers.Jun 11 2026, 4:59 PM

Jdlrobson-WMF added a subscriber: Sneha.

Are we referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page as Wikipedia main page here? If so, I thought we were not going to do any experiments or interventions on that page in order to not disrupt that page. I thought the new hypothesis for personalized recommendations would be first explored on saved pages.

Jdlrobson-WMF moved this task from Backlog to Feature requests on the MediaWiki-extensions-ReadingLists board.Jun 17 2026, 4:12 PM

Pppery added a project: Community-Wishlist.Jun 27 2026, 4:01 AM

Jdlrobson-WMF added a project: Article-Recommendation.Aug 27 2026, 9:00 PM

Jdlrobson-WMF edited projects, added: FY26-27 DE 3.2.2 Article recommendations; removed: Article-Recommendation.

HFan-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)Aug 28 2026, 6:13 PM

HFan-WMF moved this task from Backlog to Watching/Tracking on the Reader Experience Team board.Aug 28 2026, 6:15 PM

HFan-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)Aug 28 2026, 6:45 PM

Sneha lowered the priority of this task from High to Low.Aug 28 2026, 8:39 PM

Sneha raised the priority of this task from Low to Needs Triage.Aug 28 2026, 8:41 PM

Jdlrobson-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.Aug 28 2026, 8:46 PM