Wikipedia:Reader
 | This page in a nutshell: A reader is someone who simply visits Wikipedia to read articles, not to edit or create them. |
A reader is someone who visits Wikipedia articles to read rather than edit the content or create more contents. Editors, often referred to as Wikipedians if logged in, also read Wikipedia of course, but as well as reading they also edit the pages to help build the encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is now one of the top ten most visited websites on the Internet with the Main Page receiving about 210 million visitors per day[1] and 150 million hits per month.[2]
The most viewed articles on Wikipedia for May 2011 were:
| Rank | Article | Number of hits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Special:Export/SynchronizationStartTime | 1292082755 |
| 2 | Main Page | 155291284 |
| 3 | Special:Random | 143469479 |
| 4 | Special:Search | 125350656 |
| 5 | Special:Export/Robert L. Bradley, Jr | 39275277 |
| 6 | 404 error | 19831751 |
| 7 | Special:Export/William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr | 19042194 |
| 8 | WikiLeaks | 5032217 |
| 9 | Wiki | 3541971 |
| 10 | Christmas | 2900390 |
Updates may be found at stats.grok.se/en/top
Wikipedia currently has 6,852,051 articles that are edited by 113,822 active editors. Therefore, as an encyclopaedia used as a reference source by readers – and the majority of visitors are in fact readers – it is important that pages and articles are optimised for this readership.
See also
- Wikipedia:Readers First (essay)
- Wikipedia:Make articles useful for readers (essay)