Wikipedia Experiments with "Last Updated " Timestamp

Wikipedia has been running a small experiment to make the "freshness" of an article more obvious to users via a simple addition, a prominent timestamp. All Wikipedia pages already feature a timestamp, at the end of the page, indicating the last time it was updated. But few people notice it or know it's there.

In the experiment a timestamp saying something to the effect of "last updated 5 days ago" was added to the top of the page with a link to the history tab. The experiment showed that people clocked the existing View History link twice as often as they would normally.

The goal of the experiment was to determine whether the more prominent spurred users to get more engaged, which it did. It's not decided yet, but the feature may become a permanent one. There are some benefits, though it may lead to some people trusting the information in a page less even though it may be about a topic that doesn't really change that much over the years.


Via: Wikipedia Experiments with "Last Updated " Timestamp