Home
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Home
A unified "home" view that helps readers and contributors discover meaningful opportunities, track their impact, and build lasting participation habits.
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The Wikimedia Foundation is developing a unified Home to help Wikimedians at every stage, from curious readers to experienced editors and moderators, find meaningful ways to participate and grow.
The goal is simple: make it easier to discover the right contribution opportunity at the right moment, understand the impact of your work, and keep coming back.
Discover the current deployments and the changes.
Why now?
[edit]Today, the contributor experience is fragmented. Newcomers often struggle to find their footing, experienced editors lack visibility into where they're most needed, and moderators juggle tools spread across multiple interfaces. Meanwhile, active editor numbers have declined across Wikimedia projects.
This project builds on what we've already learned from the Newcomer Homepage and the Dashboard, and brings them together into a single, cohesive experience called Home.
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What will it do?
[edit]The Home view is designed to be modular and customizable, supporting contributors across the full journey:
- New account holders — engaging recommendations and guided first steps
- New editors — structured tasks, early wins, and access to help
- Developing contributors — skill-building opportunities and progression signals
- Experienced editors — visibility into high-impact work aligned with their expertise
- Moderators — streamlined workflows and reduced tool fragmentation
Key features will include interest-based task recommendations, visible impact tracking, milestone recognition, and a consistent "home base" to return to.
How recommendations are generated?
How will we measure success?
[edit]Our primary measure of success is second-week edit retention, the percentage of new editors who return to publish at least one edit in days 7–14 following their first constructive edit on a main namespace.
We also track a set of secondary metrics to help us understand why retention is changing and a set of guardrail metrics to ensure that growth in newcomer participation does not come at the expense of wiki health.
Why "Home"?
[edit]The original project was named "Personal Dashboard". "Dashboard" implies a control panel with stats and admin tools, which sets the wrong expectations and is already a loaded term on the wikis.
Home is a natural evolution of the Newcomer Homepage and the Moderator Tools's Dashboard, so the name carries continuity for communities already familiar with these features.
Wikipedia Apps also have a "Home", which keeps our naming for similar features consistent across platforms. Outside of our ecosystem, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Duolingo all use “Home” for their personalized landing surface, and per Jakob's Law, users expect our products to work like the ones they already use.
For developers, Home lives in Extension:PersonalDashboard, and that extension is just the foundation: over time, other teams and extensions will build on and “furnish” the Home.
What's happening in Q1
[edit]In July 2026 through September 2026, we will focus on community outreach and laying the groundwork for a more cohesive, personal landing page for readers and contributors. Here's what we're working on:
Early onboarding
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We're simplifying the post-account creation experience to reduce friction and help new users quickly understand what to do next. With less noise, fewer competing calls to action, and clearer guidance from the moment someone creates an account.
Once interests are selected we display suggestions related to those interests to populate Daily Reads and Suggested Edits. Account holders can change or remove their interests at any time.
Impact data
[edit]Contributors will gain a clearer view of the reach and value of their edits through an expanded Impact module on the Home. This also marks an important technical milestone: demonstrating that additional teams can register and display their own modules within the PersonalDashboard extension, making it more extensible over time.
Diff design improvements
[edit]This is a Q1 design hypothesis, intended to queue up implementable work for Q2. The goal of the Review Changes module in the Personal Dashboard is to engage newer editors in the practice of staying up to date with the edits that have been made to the pages they are interested in. We hypothesize that this feature can drive retention among newer editors. To make the feature as engaging as possible, we need to ensure that the full journey a user goes through with it is clear, actionable, and provides an obvious next step.
Surfacing Review Changes to new users
[edit]We're testing whether inviting newer contributors to review recent edits gives them a more compelling reason to return. This includes UX improvements to make the reviewing experience clearer and more actionable, as well as early work on a recommender system to surface the most relevant edits to each user.
Researching smarter recommendations
[edit]We're investing in research to better understand how to match contributors and moderators with the right tasks at the right moment, based on signals like skill level, interests, and context. This will inform both near-term improvements to existing tools and longer-term evolution of the contribution discovery experience.
Micro-learning videos
[edit]Working with the Community Development team, we're developing short micro-learning videos based on the Wikimedia Core Curriculum to help new contributors build confidence, with plans to eventually A/B test embedding these learning videos in the Home experience.
Moving modules from the Growth Homepage to Home
[edit]We are migrating the Homepage modules to Home that are used regularly by newcomers (Suggested Edits, Impact, and Mentorship).
The Email module will not be moved to Home. It will be replaced by a future initiative from the Product Safety and Integrity team, who are pursuing alternate approaches to ensure email addresses are confirmed.
The Homepage Banner, located at MediaWiki:Growthexperiments-homepage-module-banner was developed as a temporary solution and will be deprecated.
The Community Updates module is only used by a few wikis. We hope to either migrate this module, or develop it further, however the module will not be included in the initial pilot release of Home.
Given the low interaction with the Help module, which lists pages newcomers could read, we haven't plans to port it to Home. We expect to replace this module with a feature that is oriented towards learning.
How this fits into the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan
[edit]This project contributes to the Wikimedia Foundation's 2026-2027 Annual Plan, under the Deepen Engagement (DE) goal. The Contributors group set an ambitious target of doubling the number of retained editors within two years, with the overall approach outlined in the Contributor Strategy.
This Home milestone (Key Result DE1.3) focuses on second-week retention:
- By the end of Q2, achieve at least a 12% relative increase in second-week retention for editors who are presented with interventions focused on editor progression through controlled experiments, compared to editors in the control group.
Get involved
[edit]We'd love your feedback! Please share your thoughts on the Talk page!
