Ŋun su yɛltɔɣa:Masssly/Archive/December 2025
Pahimi yaɣiliWikimedia Apps Newsletter – Fourth Quarter of 2025
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]Hello, and welcome to the final newsletter of 2025!
In this edition, we’ll walk you through the major updates, experiments, and improvements in the Wikipedia mobile apps during October, November, and early December.
Throughout October and November, the team made final updates to the Year in Review feature, preparing it for its early December release.
Key improvements included:
- Updating the Total Edits slide to represent global edits across all Wikimedia projects.
- Running usability tests, which showed strong user interest in personalized slides—especially reading patterns, top articles, categories, and geo insights.
- Preparing the A/B test that will allow some logged-out users to view personalized content.
We also added fundraising banner suppression for users who donated in the past 250 days, so that users who may have donated from the Year in Review do not see a banner.
We continued work on the New Tab Experience and ran the A/B/C test for recommendations within the tabs overview.
The experiment concluded on November 18 and showed:
- Recommendations increased pageviews and new tab openings. However, they did not improve multi-day usage or overall retention.
- “Because you read” recommendations performed better than “Did you know.”
- Group C had slightly higher satisfaction and lower dissatisfaction.
Next steps:
- Scale the new tab experience, including “close all tabs,” to all users.
- Do not scale recommendations yet until after further investigation.
Work continued on Activity Tab V2, preparing to test it against the existing History tab. Updates included:
- Integrating learnings from Android’s successful Activity Tab experiment.
- Building new onboarding, instrumentation, and module behavior.
- A first version was released in early December.
Other iOS Updates
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]- We ran a survey on the Explore tab launched to gather user feedback.
- OAuth adoption was explored by engineering and design.
- Bug fixes for login with 2FA, search in Saved, and other regressions.
- Compatibility testing completed for m. subdomain removal.
Android
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]By October, the Activity Tab experiment delivered strong results:
- Return rate for logged-in users increased by 11.6% compared to the previous Edit tab.
- Experiment had no negative impact on overall retention.
- Only 0.7% of users turned the feature off.
In November, we made several improvements, and then scaled the Activity Tab to all logged-in users.
Year in Review 2025
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]The team finalized core implementation, prepared for the December release, and:
- Updated the Total Edits slide to reflect global edits across projects.
- Prepared the A/B test for the Year in Review Reading List, which will offer a personalized reading list to some users.
- Conducted final usability reviews.
We began development of the second donation reminder experiment, planned for December–March.
This experiment:
- Targets users who click “Maybe later” on fundraising banners.
- Tests a fully customizable reminder flow versus the current “Maybe later” behavior.
- Allows users to adjust reminder frequency, article-count triggers, and manage their reminder settings.
Other Android Updates
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]- We ran a survey on the Explore tab launched to gather user feedback.
- OAuth adoption was explored by engineering and design.
- Fixed issues with “Forgot your password” in Chinese, dark-mode rendering problems, punctuation-based errors, and navigation bugs.
- Added ISO currency codes to donation forms.
- Updated several settings and entry points to prepare for the fundraising season.
Cross-Platform
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]Release of Wikipedia Year in Review 2025
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]Looking Ahead
[mali mi di yibu sheena n-niŋ]This quarter brought major progress across Tabs, Activity, Year in Review, and Donation Reminder work.
As we close 2025, both apps now support a richer set of personalization features, clearer navigation paths, and more user-controlled donation experiences.
Thank you for following along, and stay tuned for our next newsletter in early 2026!