A reader is someone who visits Wikipedia articles to read rather than edit the content. Editors, often referred to as Wikipedians, also read Wikipedia of course, but as well as reading they also edit the pages to help build the encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia is now one of the top ten most visited websites on the the Internet with the Main Page receiving about 150 million hits per month.^[1] The top five articles being read at present are:

This data is not being updated at present.

1. Lou Albano (19,858 hits last hour)
2. Canada (12,832 hits last hour)
3. Noesis (11,567 hits last hour)
4. 2010 FIFA World Cup qualification (9,500 hits last hour)
5. Wiki (7,899 hits last hour)

Wikipedia currently has 3,120,674 articles that are edited by 157,001 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.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Readers First (essay)
• Wikipedia:Make articles useful for readers (essay)

[edit] References