Jimmy Wales wrote in part:
I think the term "user" helps to emphasize something radical about the wiki concept -- ordinary *users* can edit the site.
I agree with this.
In practice, there are (at least) two classes of Wikipedia users: the ordinary users that come to look stuff up after a Google match, and the regular editors that come here to work on articles. But this distinction doesn't exist in theory, and it's good to encourage the idea that users (hey, that's me, I'm a user 'cause I just looked something up here!) are the people that edit the site (so that's me too!).
-- Toby