Reader Preferences and Behavior on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a collaboratively-edited online encyclopaedia that re-lies on thousands of editors to both contribute articles and main-tain their quality. Over the last years, research has extensively investigated this group of users while another group of Wikipe-dia users, the readers, their preferences and their behavior have not been much studied. This paper makes this group and its ac-tivities visible and valuable to Wikipedia’s editor community. We carried out a study on two datasets covering a 13-months period to obtain insights on users preferences and reading behavior in Wikipedia. We show that the most read articles do not necessarily correspond to those frequently edited, suggesting some degree of non-alignment between user reading preferences and author edit-ing preferences. We also identified that popular and often edited articles are read according to four main patterns, and that how an article is read may change over time. We illustrate how this infor-mation can provide valuable insights to Wikipedia’s editor commu-nity