Wikimedia Foundation: “Wikipedia has remained a critical and widely-used resource for knowledge across the world for the past two decades.  Over this time, the site has expanded significantly to contain unparalleled amounts of reliable and thorough information, including 53 million articles across over 300 languages. While Wikipedia’s content has grown rapidly, our interface has not kept pace.  We’re proud that our website is more direct, simple, and advertisement-free than the rest of the internet.  Yet, the design of desktop Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects have not seen any substantive changes for the past 10 years, leaving certain elements of the site’s navigation feeling clunky and overwhelming to readers and editors whose main purpose is to create, learn, and curate content.

The desktop design is particularly important to new users who have come to the internet for the first time over the last decade.  To these users, much of the wide range of functionality on the site can feel overwhelming and difficult to understand.  In order to welcome them to our projects and entice them to come back, we need to provide not only excellent content and an experience that is engaging and easy to use, but also an experience that is on-par with their perceptions of a modern, trustworthy, and welcoming site. At the same time, we wish to keep the core of our identity and evolve in a way such that the final product indisputably looks and feels like a Wikimedia project. We want to create an experience that feels similar to our long-time users, yet straightforward and intuitive for new folks.

It is with these goals in mind that the Wikimedia Foundation began a multi-year project to improve Wikipedia’s desktop. Since May 2019, we have been working to strengthen the Wikipedia desktop interface — focusing on bringing our content to the forefront, and making the site easier to navigate. Our goal is to create a more welcoming experience for all who come to our projects, regardless of background or level of experience with Wikimedia sites…”