New video is out on the Little Language Models channel: How Wikipedia organizes knowledge on its 25-year-old website – Information architecture breakdown.
I review Wikipedia’s website navigation, page structure, and how the non-profit organizes information to surface knowledge to over 2 billion monthly users.
Chapters include:
- 00:00 Wikipedia intro
- 1:09 Wikipedia’s homepage and the first type of structured information (by language)
- 2:39 Article page (Coffee) structure: left nav pane, main content, and an interesting choice for the appearance toggle
- 3:54 Every page leads to philosophy – but how? 3 main content types: Article, Category, Navigation template
6:40 Main information groupings for all Wikipedia articles (550 portals!) and content modeling - 9:58 Improving content discoverability through On This Day, Do You Know, and Featured Images
- 11:00 Wikipedia’s navigation, unique menu placement change offering, and using a long list to format information (not recommended)
- 12:47 Wrap up and shout out to my favorite Wikipedia resource, Depths of Wikipedia
Happy 25th birthday to the world’s encyclopedia!
This breakdown offers a practical overview of day-to-day information architecture decisions and potential methods to structure large amounts of information. Enjoy!
