Wikipedia:Readers first

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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WP:RF

This page in a nutshell: Communicate information so that readers can understand it

Guidelines

Remember the audience is wide and the audience is international – merely thinking about this will help.

Try to avoid jargon – but where it is particularly relevant or where it is necessary, explain all jargon clearly on the article page – a link to another article is not enough.

If someone says they find something difficult to understand, believe them.

Use common words, phrases and styles rather than less common words, phrases and styles.

Where completely different words are used for the same thing in different types of English, refer to all of them in the lead.

Remember web search engines often are biased towards American usage. Results are often not a reliable barometer of international usage. (See e.g. Wikipedia:Google test.)

If you find yourself defending something as it is the "academic standard" or because it is what you as an editor want, you know you're going wrong! Write for our readers, not for academics and not for yourself.

Something obvious to you, may not be to someone else. Or to look at it another way, a low-value question in the American Who Wants to be a Millionaire? may be a high-value question in the British version, or vice versa!

Remember that the main purpose of Wikipedia is to provide useful articles for readers. For an encyclopedia, like Wikipedia, this clearly means providing reliable and accurate information. But it goes beyond this. It means providing that reliable and accurate information in a way that the reader will understand and find interesting. This encourages readers to stay, to follow links to more information, maybe even to contribute to Wikipedia themselves. If information is reliable and accurate, but presented in a way that is difficult for the reader to understand, or in a style the reader does not like, then the reader will go to one of the many other online encyclopaedias or other sources of information.

You may have been directed to this page because an article you're working on has been identified as being difficult for a layman to understand. If so, please do not think it means your contributions are not appreciated – they are! Instead, it means that a reader is suggesting that the wording or style be changed or modified to make it easier for a layman to read – and hopefully increase the readership of your efforts to boot. The rest of this page outlines further the importance of putting readers first, together with offering some guidelines of how to make an article reach a larger audience.

You should decide yourself whether it is more important to write articles or to promote Wikipedia, whether it is more useful to write new articles, improve existing ones, organize indexes, etc.