Wikipedia

I created my Wikipedia account (I believe) sometime in 2005. I made a number of edits to Wikipedia around 2005-2006, but then reduced my involvement with it for the next few years. I started getting more involved in late 2011, and I created and edited a number of pages in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. My initial involvement with Wikipedia occurred while I was an undergraduate studying mathematics and computer science at Chennai Mathematical Institute. On my undergraduate experience page, I credit my college roommate Shreevatsa with introducing me to the idea of Wikipedia editing and many other aspects of hacker culture.

My user profile on Wikipedia is here and my full list of contributions can be accessed here.

Between April and July 2014, I worked on the Wikipedia Views website, that allows for easy tabular comparison of view counts of multiple pages across multiple months. You can use the website to access the view counts for pages I created using this link (for a month-wise breakdown, use this link). Starting August 2014, Wikipedia pages I created have been getting over 100,000 pageviews a month. In total, pages I created throughout my lifetime got 1,115,594 pageviews in 2014. I expect between 1.5 million and 2.2 million pageviews in 2015 for pages I have created. The pageview count for the first half of the year (January to June) is 887,195.

These numbers somewhat overestimate my contribution, because the pages I created were also edited by others. On the other hand, I’ve also made significant edits to other pages that I’m not including here (and whose view stats you can view here by year or here by month).

According to this page (as seen on May 22, 2015), I have created 311 Wikipedia pages, and that places me at rank 1672 among all Wikipedia users in terms of number of pages created. However, some of these may be pages that were subsequently deleted, and I don’t include all the pages in the link above for pages I created.

A couple of caveats should be noted about the numbers:

  • They do not include views on the mobile domain (m.wikipedia.org).
  • They include views by bots, which are estimated to account for 15% of views overall but a larger percentage of views for pages that get fewer overall views.

I believe that under some restricted circumstances, editing Wikipedia can generate huge social value. You might wish to read this essay by my friend Brian Tomasik on the issue. Brian echoes some of my thoughts, and some of the examples of pages created that he cites (specifically, the Wikipedia pages on earning to give and room for more funding) were created by me.

See also:

Basic information