User blog comment:FishTank/Organized spaces on Fandom/@comment-34106721-20190923212118/@comment-4522253-20190924000625

I'm actually very glad you've brought this up, as it's a lingering question that many wiki community leaders have dealt with: how much focus should readers have? One of the better ways to answer that is an explanation of what my team is and what we try to accomplish with Best Practices.

As a company, Fandom's work is in service to editors first. That's what the Editor Experience team, of which I'm a part, is all about. We believe that every user that enters the Fandom network should be provided with clear communication, encouragement, and helpful tools to spend their valuable time contributing to our communities. We believe that our visitors always have something to contribute and we partner with our users at all experience and skill levels to guide them to an engaging and rewarding experience on our wikis. Creating a great experience for editors to create incredible content serves the needs of readers and contributors alike. That's our job, and we love to do it. While we spend a good amount of time working on the specific needs of reader, we have found that we often serve the readers best by helping editors as much as we can, through deploying new tools, making enhancements to existing features, and providing best practices education.

As a community of wikis, the editors' work is in service to readers. This is a matter of sheer scale: there are a few hundred thousand editors, and a few hundred million readers. We (the few hundred employees of Fandom) cannot operate at the scale required to effect the changes we seek to make (with projects like Best Practices) for the benefit of the hundreds of millions of readers who come to Fandom and Gamepedia every month. We need the help of editors that truly want to make their communities the best they can be. By distributing Best Practices blogs to our editors, we are empowering a much larger group to effect change on their own wikis for the betterment of their content and the experience of their readers. The suggestions and advice in these posts are carefully weighed by experts in their fields and veteran editors that have been doing this for years, and we're standing by what we're saying in them.

The bottom line is: Our experience since the beginning, and our data since, has been that readers seek to contribute to the communities they feel passionate about. If we make readers comfortable and give them the tools and mentoring they need, they will become happy editors.