Wikimédia France
2021
How do you make Wikipedia’s volunteers visible in a 20-year-old interface?
Wikimédia France asked how Wikipedia readers could notice the volunteer work behind every article, and thank the people who wrote it. The answer had to fit an interface that had barely changed in twenty years, without weighing on its architecture. In a school hackathon, our team of seven proposed three discreet features built on what readers already do on the page. Wikimédia France gave our solution its coup de cœur.
The brief
Make the volunteers visible, without changing Wikipedia
Readers use Wikipedia every day without seeing who wrote what they read. Rather than add a new layer on top of the page, we attached each feature to something readers already do: opening an article, selecting text, scrolling down it.
Design decision 01
Put names on the article
A block in the left sidebar shows how many contributors worked on the article and five of their pseudonyms, picked at random. Picking them at random keeps the data the block needs to a minimum.
Design decision 02
Turn a text selection into a thank-you
When a reader selects text, a pop-in appears with a question inviting them to thank the contributors, next to a button for copying the text.
Design decision 03
Show reading progress, and the work behind it
A reading bar shows readers how far they’ve got: a solid pattern marks a passage they read, a striped one a passage they scrolled past. Below the bar, a playful fact about the contributors’ work nudges readers to say thanks, such as “Thanks to you, we’ve already filled a football stadium with thank-yous!” Arrows let them browse other facts, and a new one appears with each page load.
Visual direction
A molecule for a community
I co-led the creative research, and the team and our supervisors chose my direction: contributors writing together as molecules linking to each other. We kept Wikipedia’s essentials and added a few accents, with different writing styles in the typography and a red in the palette.
From there, we put together a small kit for the three features: text styles, a colour palette, icons and nine components. Each component came with all its states, including a disabled one: once a reader has sent 50 thanks, the button turns grey for them, so it can’t be clicked just for fun.
Retrospective
A coup de cœur from Wikimédia France
Wikimédia France singled out our solution with its coup de cœur, and the proof of concept shows the features working on a Wikipedia page. Working inside a twenty-year-old interface taught me to add something new without breaking what people already know.
View the presentation slides online.
