Wikipedia is an online and free encyclopedia meant for everyone.
Since 2001, the creation of Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has been gathering facts, data and about every human knowledge to populate its ever-growing database.
But when it thinks that all those aren't just enough, on July 28th, 2016, Wikipedia is getting a fresh new look that packs a new set of features.
For Android users, the main screen of the app now shows an Explore feed which recommends photos, articles and other things based on the user's previous reads and current events. This redesign should encourage users in exploring more of Wikipedia, especially useful after finding out interesting contents.
The appearance that resembles Google in showing its Now cards, can show some suggestions, which are:
- In the news: Appears at the top of the feed. It shows new and updated articles based on current news stories with relevant Wikipedia articles.
- Trending articles: Shows the top five most read (popular) articles of the day.
- Featured picture: A bold image selected every day by Wikipedia's editor community.
- Featured article:Handpicked by Wikipedia's editor community on a daily basis.
- Because you read: is based on your previous interests.
- Continue reading: Shows recommended articles based on what you've previously read on Wikipedia.
- Today on Wikipedia: A shortcut to Wikipedia's main page based on the user's preferred language.
- Randomizer: Just like the name suggest, it shows random articles from the generator.
The feed is like where everything is at, everything that Wikipedia has curated. As users scroll further down, they'll see featured content from previous days - yesterday's trending articles, yesterday’s featured picture, and more.
And just like cards, a simple swipe will remove the content from the feed.
As for developers, Wikipedia's team has made the service available for everyone and anywhere to build upon it. The team has structured the data provided by the service in a simple format so they can be used by other apps or web applications. What this means, developers just need a single web request to fetch Wikipedia's content and put it on their own app. Wikipedia has put a documentation regarding this.
Wikipedia's update also makes the encyclopedia more social. For each feature shown in the feed, for example, users have the option to share the article using their favorite social media apps. They also have the option to save any article to a personal reading list so that article will be available offline.
So not only that the Wikipedia app has been redesigned to ease users in finding the information they want and make developers easy to implement Wikipedia on their own project, Wikipedia also provides a more interesting, recommended contents that encourage interaction.
For people that use Wikipedia often, this update is indeed huge. They can actually explore Wikipedia in a more fun and relevant way, rather just stumbling upon articles they're curious about.
And because more features means more things to do, Wikipedia also makes its app easier to use. Wikipedia's update also features a more prominent Search bar at the top of the feed, with integrated voice search.