The Future-Audiences team is planning to introduce a new ShareCard feature to the mobile web version of Wikipedia. This feature is the successor to the Share Highlights experiment (T416432). It brings article-level sharing to mobile web as a stand-alone feature: a dedicated "share" button in the article's page actions opens a dialog that generates a shareable image of the article and hands it off to the device's native share sheet.
Unlike Share Highlights, ShareCard does not include text selection or text fragment URLs. It focuses on the article-level share flow only (at least for the time being).
Links
- Proof of concept (reference implementation): https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaCustomizations/+/1342024
- Predecessor epic: T416432
- Predecessor launch checklist: T424764
- Predecessor design specs: T418602
Background
Reader Growth ran Share Highlights as a Test Kitchen experiment. It combined article-level sharing with excerpt-level (quote) sharing using text selection and text fragment URLs. ShareCard keeps the article-level half of that work and makes it a feature in its own right, not an experiment variant.
What's different from Share Highlights
- Scope: Article share only. No text selection, no floating share button, no text fragment URLs.
- Delivery: Rolled out as a flagged feature, enabled per wiki. It is not a Test Kitchen experiment.
Approach
User flow
- Reader taps the share icon in the article's page actions
- A dialog opens with a generated card: article title, lead image, summary extract, and attribution
- Where the browser can share files via the Web Share API, the primary action opens the native share sheet with the card image and article link
- Where it can't, the primary action downloads the card as an image
- "Copy link" is available as a secondary action
Scope
- Mobile web (Minerva)
- Article pages (main namespace, view action)
Technical approach
The POC demonstrates a workable approach:
- A share button added to the page actions toolbar
- A Vue + Codex dialog, loaded client-side
- Card content (title, image, extract) from the page summary API
- The card image rendered client-side from the dialog's markup
- Shared links tagged with a provenance parameter for measurement
The final home for the code is still open (see below). The details above may change when the implementation moves.
Rollout and measurement
ShareCard will ship as a flagged feature rollout, enabled on a per-wiki basis.
We plan to introduce new product health metrics for the feature, likely defined in GrowthBook. Metric definitions and the instrumentation needed to support them will be handled in a sub-task.
Open Questions
- Where should the code live? Options include core (alongside the existing Web Share utility in mediawiki.page.ready) or an extension. If it goes to core, should the generic share action and the card generator be split?
- Which wikis get it first? What's the rollout sequence for this feature?
- How do we track provenance? Reuse Share Highlights' value, or register a new one so the two can be separated in analytics?
- Security review: Do the third-party libraries used for image generation need a new review, or does the Share Highlights review cover them?
- Known issues: Do the Share Highlights card issues carry over? (Missing images on some clients T424667, card height with images T426616)
- Attribution: Do we need to change the card design to make use of the new attribution framework?
- Browser support: What is the minimum browser support, and how should unsupported browsers degrade?
