What if Wikipedia starts doing Stories
One picture is a thousand words.
but a thousand words can’t be replaced with one image.
What words can articulate, the image can’t as it is always speculative.
From 2013 when Snapchat launched stories to today when almost every platform is using this feature to ensure continuous engagement from customers.
Today Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, youtube and even Behance providing stories as a form of interaction. some of them are awesome like Insta stories & WhatsApp status . while others feel unnecessary like YouTube or Behance stories.
Stories are a very awesome way to scroll through your feeds swipe swipe swipe and stay what piques your interest.
Also, it drives more engagement than regular posts. as they are also temporary so there’s no long term commitment with whatever you post.
So how would it feel if one of the biggest sources of knowledge pool i.e Wikipedia starts to do stories?
well let’s find out
first, let’s talk a little bit about Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is more about textual information then visuals
but stories, on the other hand, are all about visual rather than a large chunk of text.
also, there are no friends or influencers you can follow on Wikipedia. so there is no direct content creator on Wikipedia. who can publish stories
so how do we make stories work for Wikipedia?
Let’s begin from what Wikipedia does have
Wikipedia has topics / Information about a person, place, event or anything or anyone famous or semifamous.
Why do we use Wikipedia?
To get information about a certain thing which is in-depth and authentic.
Basically, if we want Wikipedia to do stories we want authentic and in-depth information in that story and it should be relevant to us as Wikipedia have a huge knowledge pool and we don’t want all that at once.
Wikipedia can start analysing your search history and can find out which category of events piques your interest.
Let’s say you have been frequently searching for Hollywood actors on Wikipedia.
like Crish Evans, Crish Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., Tony Stark etc.
Wikipedia can show you info stories about MCEU. you can be suggested to see about the Black widow, Thor, Stan Lee.
But your search history will be multidirectional and multigroup. so showing info stories will only be monotonous and useless.
We want info stories about different things, therefore, we need grouped info stories.
For each group, we can have multiple info stories for example
Group 1 — MCEU — Black Widow, Thor, Stan Lee
Group 2 — SDLC — Product Development, Development Lifecycle, Agile Model
Group 3 — Tech Giants — Apple Inc. , IBM, HTC, Motorola
We can assign gestures like tap tap tap to move to the next story and swipe left-right to move to next and previous group respectively.
We can also move to the next group after we tap on the last story of the group.
every story will move to the next one after 10 sec. (an educated guess which can be corrected after gathering more interaction data )
Wikipedia homepage can have a list of stories group on the top header just below the Search function.
Full-screen story with an image in the background and a small summary of the text in the front afterall Wikipedia is all about information
User can swipe up to view more details and swipe down to return back
swipe left or right to move to another group of stories.
tap on the right area of the screen to move to the next story in the same group (will move to the next group if this is the last story of that group).
and vice versa for taping on the left side of the screen.
it is very much alike Instagram as most people are familiar with the interface and creating new gestures for Wikipedia stories is not ideal. (also I really like Instagram story gestures so I am biased).
that’s it for my version of Wikipedia stories. see you in the next one.
you can clap up to 50 times depending on how much you liked this concept.
let me know your thoughts about Wikipedia stories or about other app doing stories in comments down below.
