Wikipedia has introduced new features to help recruit and retain new editors for the famous online encyclopedia. These new editors will have more online assistance to help them edit various pages in their favorite fields.

The idea is to simplify the editing process, which has previously been considered daunting. Indeed, too many new editors find it difficult to continue contributing to Wikipedia because of the complexity of the editing process. To support them, the Wikimedia Foundation has deployed new features to improve their productivity.

New contributors are provided with a dedicated landing page with a host of resources to help them find answers to all their questions. It even includes a direct link to a mentor who can help and guide them in their missions. They also have access to a feed of suggested contributions that's intended to be relevant to their areas of interest. Finally, a "help panel" contains numerous resources available to contributors when modifying existing pages. They are thus guided towards the information to be updated in priority. In some cases, an algorithm can even suggest words or phrases to include links to other pages in the online encyclopedia. Note that all these new features are accessible regardless of the type of device used, and that they have been in testing since 2019 before being automatically deployed to all new contributors.

Nearly 300,000 people contribute to editing Wikipedia pages each month. Note that the editing rules may vary from one language version to another.

Wikipedia currently contains more than 246 million pages and is available in 318 languages. Depending on the language, the amount of available information varies considerably. The encyclopedia includes more than 6.5 million entries in English, the most used language on the platform. In second place is Cebuano, spoken in the Philippines, with 6.1 million articles, followed by German (2.7 million), Swedish (2.5 million) and French (2.4 million).

 - AFP Relaxnews