Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 10 most visited websites, and a resource used by billions every month are getting its first makeover on the desktop in over a decade. The Wikimedia Foundation, which leads the Wikipedia project, today announced the launch of an updated user interface aimed at making the site more accessible and user-friendly.

Updated headers to provide access to frequently used links, updates to the Wikipedia article table of contents, and other design changes for a better reading experience. The interface has already been launched on hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia in recent weeks, but is now rolling out to English Wikipedia, it said. The changes being introduced are not very productive — in fact, they may not even be immediately noticed by some users.

The organization, however, says the update was necessary to meet the needs of the next generation of internet users, including those who are more newly coming online and may have less familiarity with the internet. To develop the new interface, the Foundation worked with over 30 different volunteer groups around the world, including users from countries such as India, Indonesia, Ghana, and Argentina, to contribute to testing the update and developing the product.

The purpose of this update is to make Wikipedia a more modern web platform, remove clutter, and make it easier for users to contribute. It was also intended to make the desktop web version more consistent with Wikipedia's mobile version. Changes include a new and improved search box that now uses both images and descriptions in the autocomplete suggestions that appear as you type, making it easier for users to find the items they need.

This change, like many others introduced, is relatively minor, but it provides visual cues that make searching faster and more convenient. The Wikimedia Foundation says the update increased user searches by 30% when tested. This is a reminder that even small changes can have a big impact on the actual use of the product. Another change is the updated sticky header.

Here you'll find commonly used links such as search, page names, and sections that scroll down and stay stuck at the top of the page. This means users no longer need to scroll up to find what they are looking for, and can instead focus on reading and editing content with the help of the Wikipedia page creation service.

Again, this seems like a minor tweak, but it reduced the scroll rate by over 15% during testing. This might be helpful for people who spend a lot of time navigating pages and sections on Wikipedia, but it's more of an annoyance with the site than a real problem. In our tests, we also found that changes initiated by the edit button in the header were undone less frequently than changes initiated by other edit buttons on the page.

The language switcher tool has been available for some time but has now been moved to a more prominent position in the top right, allowing readers and editors to switch between over 300 supported languages. This may be useful in emerging markets where multilingual users may want to access pages in other languages.

A new table of contents on the left side of the article to help users navigate lengthy content stays visible as you scroll down the page, helping you see which section you're currently reading. This allows you to easily navigate and switch between different parts of the article as you delve deeper into the topic. Again useful, but not world-changing.

Other changes to the site include adding a collapsible sidebar for distraction-free reading and changing the maximum line width. The foundation explained that limiting the width of long texts makes the reading experience more enjoyable and improves Wikipedia page creation service retention. However, for the logged-in user and log-out user, every page with a screen width of 1600 pixels or more has a button, which the user can use to increase the width of the page. Registered users can also set the width on the settings page.

Given Wikipedia's readership, it's clear that Wikipedia has been careful not to make breaking changes. Today, Wikipedia offers over 58 million articles in over 300 languages ​​and receives nearly 16 billion monthly visits. The announcement also noted that no existing functionality was removed as part of these changes, instead, the update's focus was on improving usability and modernizing the site. We know — after the name of the default Wikipedia skin (Vector — and there's more!) — it's been overhauled for three years, and by today it's slowly rolling out to the Wikipedia platform.

 As of December 2022, Vector 2022 is the default skin for about 300 Wikipedia worldwide and has become the default skin for Arabic and Greek Wikipedia. Today, updates to 94% of Wikipedia's 318 active language versions are available to all desktop users and will roll out to the English Wikipedia on desktop.