ProleWiki 2025 reader survey results (and daily visits answer)
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In January 2025, ProleWiki ran a reader survey for a little over a week (11 days to be precise). First of all, thank you to everyone who participated in the survey. We collected 135 responses which was a bit over the 132 we needed for our sample size. The survey was advertises on our social media platforms as well as a site notice across the whole website, which you've probably seen. ProleWiki's philosophy is serve the reader, and surveys such as these help us gauge if we are on the right track in this goal. We are a website without ads, without sponsorships, and without any commercial interest; therefore, all that we do is to better serve the reader.
The fact that we were able to collect so many responses in such a short time is already an indicator of how much people enjoy ProleWiki and want to see it improve and make a mark. By our estimation, we are 95% confident in these results with only a very small margin of error.
Before we begin: no less than two different readers (which is notable since the responses were made independently) urged us to do more agitprop. To that end, we have started running another quick poll in parallel, simply asking: How many visits do you think ProleWiki gets daily? offering over 20 choices ranging from 0 to 6000+ visits. At this time, we have received over 70 responses which is more than enough, and we find that around 20% of our readers estimate we make between 100 and 300 visits daily, which is a relative majority.
Here is the real answer as promised: currently, ProleWiki registers an average of 1200 visits per day. Only 10% of the respondents got it correct (1001-1250; we added 1250-1500 in the above percentage figure as its number was low). Over a month, this equals a little bit over 30,000 visits, month after month, durably. We also see that our readership increases durably over time -- the average was around 800 daily visits until Fall of last year. We rely on you to do agitprop as well! Link to ProleWiki where you can, use it more, advertise it more. :)
And of course, request an account to help us make ProleWiki even better.
Results
We have had the time to run through the results, and are now able to summarize our findings here. The survey was divided into the following sections: Visiting habits, New homepage opinion, Library satisfaction, and finally the new anonymous edit feature.
Visiting habits
Overall, we note that most readers visit the website a few times to several times a week, with "once a week" being a close second. Since the survey ran for over a week, we can be confident that it wasn't just the frequent readers that had a chance to see and answer it.
This means that our readership is generally engaged and visits the website somewhat regularly. We did receive responses from people who had just discovered ProleWiki, so we can be confident that most readers indeed browse the website actively on their own (instead of say, being linked a specific page in a group chat).
In terms of how people use ProleWiki, "learning theory" just barely won over "Casual browsing", with both forming by far the top response at 25% each. "Finding new sources" was close behind, and after that "reading in library" and "reading essays" form a quarter of the total responses at 12.5%. Overall though we were not entirely satisfied in how we asked the question, and the results seem to show this. If anything, it shows that we should run a later survey that focuses specifically on how people use ProleWiki and delve deeper into this question alone.
New homepage
By far, readers enjoy the new homepage -- it has a 95% approval rate (either "I like it a little" or "I like it a lot"). This shows that we are on the right track and hit the unknown variables correctly when we were designing the new homepage -- i.e., answering for ourselves "what do our readers want to see" without being able to rely on clear feedback (though we did use the results of a prior, 2023 survey to help the process).
It is more interesting to see which components of the new homepage readers use the most. The apparent search bar, though it is available from the sidebar, is clearly the most used component. And it makes sense: it's readily seen, available and inviting. The second most used feature is the pillbox, the name we gave to the small cards (which look like pills, therefore pillbox) that link to Marxism 101, Politics, Communist Parties, etc.
These two components were inspired by our original theme designers, the Citizen Wiki. They use these same two components on their wiki and it shows that they were correct to offer these features.
The next popular components of the new homepage behind these two are, in order: Featured articles, On this day, News and Featured essay, all forming the same cluster (similar number of responses), though Featured articles wins noticeably enough to make a note of it here. This shows that we can further improve the Featured articles box; originally, they were only meant to be a selection of theorists and "content producers", both past and present, so that we could orient our readers to other. However, these results show that we might do well to think deeply about how this feature could be improved.
We were surprised to see that the "Read next" box is not used as much as we expected. This doesn't mean it should be retired instantly, but that we may try rethinking it a little and try that first. Currently, Read Next is an advertisement for the library, picking a random book every day (or when the cache is refreshed). Any of our many hosted works is eligible to appear in the read next box. It may be worth collecting direct feedback on this box to really understand what readers don't like about it, or why they don't use it.
Library satisfaction
The survey asked a series of questions on a matrix about the library, with, for each statement, options ranging within: Disagree a lot, disagree a little, agree a little and agree a lot.
We see positive results overall, though they are mixed. On the library homepage is easy to navigate, it is easy to find new books to read and I use the library to read books, we see clear satisfaction, with the responses overwhelmingly being in the agreement range (80%+).
On the next questions however, namely: I use the library to discover books but don't read them here, There are not enough topics on the library homepage and it bothers me that some books are empty with only a link to a PDF, we see more mixed results, ranging from Disagree a little to Agree little.
Because we purposely didn't include a median neutral option (e.g. "Neither agree nor disagree" or "No opinion"), this could explain the mitigated results. Overall, we seem to understand that for these three statements, readers have no strong feelings. This is also positive feedback, because we know now that this is not something we need to immediately and urgently look at (notably, we were worried about allowing empty pages with only an external link to read the book).
There is however a contradiction that we will need to look deeper into: a clear majority of readers use our library to read their books, but almost half also say they use the library to find books but don't read them here. At this time, we assume that it means readers do both: reading some books on ProleWiki, and some on other libraries. We are nevertheless happy to offer this repository of books, and strive to make it browsable so that, much like in a physical library, readers can easily find their next book to read, which is one reason we promote a lot of different topics and categorized authors on the library homepage.
Anonymous editing
On anonymous editing, we overwhelmingly see that most readers are not aware the feature exists. Two things contextualize this result: 1. we only rolled out the feature a few months ago, and didn't advertise it a lot. 2. moreover, the term "anonymous edit" may not be readily meaningful outside of the editorship, and so survey takers didn't necessarily recognize it.
By anonymous editing, we mean the possibility that was introduced a few months ago of editing any page one comes across without needing an account, by just clicking the "Edit" button at the top right corner of the page (on desktop) or the pencil icon in the bottom-right corner (on mobile).
The next major option picked was "I know it exists but I haven't used it". Together, these two options form over 90% of results.
These results mean that we have work to do to advertise this feature if we want people to use it. Originally, we rolled it out as a test project, like many of our new features, so that we could test it without receiving too many inputs and becoming overwhelmed. Over time, we have found our rhythm with the anonymous editing feature and are now able to accept a much higher volume of edits. As such, we will start advertising it more in different ways -- we've already added a short line about making anonymous edits with a link to an explanation page in the Join Us homepage box.
Custom response results
On top of the multiple-choice questions analyzed above, we asked a few custom text questions. These were:
- Is there any page you feel needs improvement? (Improve)
- Is there any page you feel is an example to follow? (Exemplary)
- Is there any feature you'd like to have on ProleWiki? (Feature)
- Do you have anything else you'd like to let us know? (Misc)
We will not detail the entirety of the responses here as there are simply too many (which testifies as to the engagement of our readership). We will take the time to look at the list we compiled not only individually (considering each entry) but also on the meta, i.e. looking at the list itself and asking: what links the different entries together? What stands out? What isn't in the list? And hopefully discover new ways of improving the content of our pages.
In the Improve section, we have received a long list of pages with, sometimes, the sections readers would like to see in them. A page that stands out in there is our LGBT page (no less than 4 different readers noted it as a page to improve), of which a section was copied long ago (and unbeknownst to us) from RationalWiki. It doesn't fit our values and style anymore, and as such is a page we direly need to focus on.
The exemplary pages follow some of what we already know. Most of them were very thorough pages, and some that are mostly the product of just one of our editor were actually cited multiple times, and we will be sure to tell them that and learn from them as much as possible. It certainly makes sense that long, thorough pages would be cited as exemplary and gives us a baseline as to what we could be considered a "complete" page. However, such pages certainly don't fall from the sky but are the product of a lot of labor. As such, it's an ongoing long-term goal to bring all of our pages to this level.
The requested features show some ideas that we already had, such as adding font options (we were already looking at it) or adding TTS (we are also looking at it). Some readers requested a dark theme, but the theme already exists (from the sidebar, tap on the gear icon, and you can select the dark theme as well as other customization features). The dark theme is actually not very well-known and we've been asked for it before, but it came by default with the theme. We will be looking at making it more readily apparent. One response noted that it is impossible to export PDF books, and we were aware of that and have unfortunately been unable to fix the book plugin. We are still looking at it but are at an impasse currently as the plugin we use is not even maintained anymore. For the time being, we have taken out the book feature until we can fix it.
Otherwise, there is not much need to go into the rest of the featured suggestions and the misc feedback. Rest assured that we recorded all of them and compiled an exhaustive list. We do note several responses that congratulated and thanked us for our work on ProleWiki, and they were very touching. We made sure to convey them to the editorship.
Thank you for being with us since 2020, and thank you for participating in this reader survey. We have but big plans for the future.