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!
If you enjoyed this, check out the HOKA website breakdown and the Ticketmaster website breakdown YouTube video.
