Readers/Reader Growth/Share Card

We are planning an experiment to test the usefulness of a share feature that gives readers options to create a visually compelling card about an article (or portion of an article) they are reading. They can share this card to a friend or post it on their social media. The card will then link the viewer or recipient directly back to that article or even portion of the article when clicked.

We want to test 1) whether logged-out readers who are enjoying what they’re reading on Wikipedia want to share that content with others off-platform and 2) whether the flow we’ve designed makes it easy for them to do so.

Background

From research on global trends, we’ve learned that younger generations increasingly prefer to get their information from people they trust, which has fueled a rise in finding information through social media and social contexts. Even the same Wikipedia article can be more compelling when it’s shared by a friend than when someone finds it through their own search.

At the same time, we also know that fewer people, especially from younger generations, are coming to Wikipedia, and we want to reverse that trend by giving them new ways to discover us as a free knowledge resource.

To that end, we’re interested in A/B testing a new feature that gives readers an enhanced sharing option that lets them create a visually compelling card they can post, which will then link the viewer/recipient directly back to that article or even portion of the article. This feature aims to surface Wikipedia content to more readers while encouraging lightweight participation in reading behaviors that can, over time, inspire people to become editors themselves. People naturally want to share interesting morsels of information they find while reading–thereby signaling to friends/followers that they themselves are interesting–so this feature provides an engaging way to do so while also raising awareness that that information comes from wiki projects.

Hypothesis

If we give readers an enhanced sharing option, then 33% of readers who see the dialog will complete the enhanced share action without harming logged-out reader retention.

Design

This feature will appear in two places: (1) a new Share button that will always show in the toolbelt on article pages, and (2) upon highlighting article text, which will trigger a pop-up share card experience with the relevant article excerpt. The reader will also see options to download the image or just copy a link to the article/excerpt.

We are also optimistic that these Share cards may help subtly educate people about proper attribution. The Share card includes links back to the Wikipedia article, as well as image attribution, where relevant, and license icons.

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  This is a design mockup example of what the share card looks like when sharing the full article for chamber music.
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  This is a design mockup of what the share card looks like when a user shares a quote from the article.

Experiment

This experiment, a mobile-only A/B test for 10% of logged-out readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, and Vietnamese Wikipedias and 0.1% of readers on English Wikipedia, will go live the week of May 18 and will run for four weeks. This will only be on mobile and will use the user’s phone’s native sharing function – that is, when a user goes to share a link and their device automatically offers sharing options based on previously granted permissions.

• Primary success metric: Task completion rate
• Guardrail: Retention (likelihood a reader comes back)
• Nice to have/secondary metrics included: Open rate, page views from share links

Experiment timeline

Phase 0 (Mar – April 2026): Identify problem At the January 2026 WE3 offsite, shareable on-platform options came up repeatedly as something to explore. The Reader Growth team began brainstorming ideas and came up with very early design explorations.

In February 2026, we showed these early designs and shared some of the background thinking for a share button to a group of editors on the English Wikipedia Discord. We got feedback around attribution and licensing considerations, image selection, and other related ideas.

Phase 1 (May - June 2026): Experiment with feature idea The A/B test will show readers in treatment an enhanced sharing option (readers in control will not see the option). It will measure click-through rate, retention, and other secondary engagement metrics. The experiment will run for 4 weeks when it will be turned off, data will be analyzed, and we will then report back on results and propose next steps.

Questions this phase will answer:

• Is this feature useful to readers? (measured by task completion rate)
• Does seeing a share option help readers come back more frequently to Wikipedia? (measured by retention)
• Do readers who come to Wikipedia via share links come back more frequently? (measured by retention)
• Should we build this feature?
• Hypothesis evaluation: Was the hypothesis correct?
  • ✅ If yes → continue with discussing the proposed idea with communities
  • ❌ If no → stop the project and document what we learned

Phase 2 (July - Aug 2026 if experiment is successful): Build feature