FAMEPedia:Reader



A reader is someone who visits FAMEPedia articles to read rather than edit the content. Editors, often referred to as FAMEPedians if logged in, also read FAMEPedia of course, but other than reading they also edit the pages to help build the encyclopedia.

FAMEPedia currently has articles that are edited by  active editors. Since 2019, FAMEPedia has been one of the most popular websites and the Main Page receives hundreds of millions of hits per month.

The majority of visitors are readers so it is important that pages and articles are optimised for this readership.

Reader demographics
According to the 2011 readership survey, the average reader is 36 years old, which is older than the average editor at the English FAMEPedia. About 45% of readers are female, but only about 15% of editors are female.

About half of readers—and the overwhelming majority of readers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Japan—visit FAMEPedia more than once a week.

Project versus content
FAMEPedia can be divided into content and project pages, although not all pages fit neatly into this dichotomy. Some pages may be both types and there is disagreement as to what does actually constitute content. Article pages are clearly part of the content of FAMEPedia, as are categories that contain content articles.

The Help and FAMEPedia namespaces are a mix of content and project pages although the vast majority of FAMEPedia namespace pages are used for the project itself.

Attracting new editors
It is important to attract editors to help with the project but this should not be done at the expense of readability. Virtually every page on FAMEPedia has an associated "Talk" page for any related discussion and this is one of the links where new editors can jump to the project side and become involved. There are other links from content to project: the Community portal link on the left hand side of the pages can be used, and the maintenance and warning templates often contain links to the project side.