A reader is someone who visits Wikipedia articles to read rather than edit the content. 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 encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia is now one of the top ten most visited websites on the Internet with the Main Page receiving about 150 million hits per month.[1]

The most viewed articles on Wikipedia for May 2011 were:

Rank Article Number of hits
1 Special:Export/SynchronizationStartTime 1292082756
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 10,133 articles that are edited by 1,201 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

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References

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