This is the tenth of my month-in-review posts. I started month-in-review posts in October 2014. You can see my first post here and my previous month-in-review post here.
Some overall background
This was a somewhat relaxed month at work for me, relative to the last three months, but still more hectic than the beginning of the year. I was able to spend more time on Wikipedia editing and blogging, but many of my personal projects have exhausted low-hanging fruit, so visible progress was relatively low.
Wikipedia editing
For background information, see my site page about Wikipedia
I created the following Wikipedia pages this month:
- Shashank Khaitan, created Tuesday, July 7, mostly on a BART ride.
- Shervin Pishevar, created partly on a BART ride on Friday, July 17, and then completed on the morning of Saturday, July 18.
- Catch and release (U.S. immigration policy), created on the evening of Saturday, July 18, starting from a long pending draft on my computer.
- Expedited removal, created on the morning of Sunday, July 19.
- Reinstatement of removal, created on the evening of Thursday, July 23, after a drafting process that spanned several BART rides. The drafting took longer because I was reading some of the referenced material in greater detail than I needed for the Wikipedia page.
- Doing Good Better, created on the evening of Monday, July 27 after a draft during a BART ride. The page is about a book by William MacAskill released the very next day about effective altruism.
- Stipulated removal, created over a morning and evening BART ride on Tuesday, July 28.
The numbers below are for pageviews in July 2015, and are based on data collated by stats.grok.se and further summarized at Wikipedia Views. As with all numbers from stats.grok.se, note that these numbers exclude mobile pageviews but include bots.
- Pages I created over my lifetime: 148,556 views.
- Pages I created in July 2015: 2,604 views.
- Pages I created in June 2015: 339 views.
- Pages I created in May 2015: 4,506 views.
- Pages I created in 2015: 28,110 views.
Comparison with forecast: I had forecast 150,000 pageviews for the month of July for all pages I created. The actual number of pageviews (148,556), was a little lower. The number falls well within my 50% estimate (135,000-175,000), my 80% estimate (110,000-220,000), and my 95% estimate (85,000-265,000).
August forecast: My point estimate for the August pageview count is 152,000 pageviews, adjusted upward slightly from the July estimate to account for the many new pages I created. My 50% probability interval estimate is 140,000-170,000 pageviews, my 80% probability interval estimate is 115,000-200,000 pageviews, and my 95% probability interval estimate is 100,000-225,000 pageviews. While my point estimate hasn’t changed, I have narrowed my intervals somewhat in light of the relatively narrow intervals in which past pageview counts have fallen. Also, I want to avoid the phenomenon where I simply choose wide ranges and feel happy to hit bull’s eye. A 50% probability interval estimate should be violated about half the time!
WikiHow
For background information, see my site page about WikiHow
I did not create any new WikiHow pages. The pages I had created in May got additional pageviews, as described below:
- How to Gauge the Popularity of a Topic Online has 559 lifetime views (68 in July).
- How to Ride BART from the East Bay to San Francisco has 442 lifetime views (99 in July).
- How to Efficiently Work Offline has 88 lifetime views (26 in July).
For July, I had been considering making one WikiHow page, focused on how to reduce Amazon EC2 costs. This will be based on my experience at my workplace, but won’t involve any information specific to my job. I believe that laying out this information clearly will be helpful to everybody: users can save costs, and more efficient use of the computational infrastructure of the world means more value can be squeezed out of it. I didn’t get time to make that page, but I just might do it this month. It’s not a priority though.
Subject wikis
General background information: My site page about the subject wikis
I did not spend any time on the subject wikis. Year-on-year traffic growth seems to have declined, though it’s still nonzero. I expect that we’re running out of whatever caused the 20% jump (accounting for seasonality) around the middle of last year, so year-on-year growth will now be sub-10%.
| Metric | Jul 2015 | Jun 2015 | May 2015 | Jul 2014 | Jun 2014 | May 2014 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pageviews | 38,388 | 48,593 | 77,232 | 34,973 | 38,363 | 63,211 |
| Sessions | 19,400 | 24,136 | 37,834 | 16,495 | 18,695 | 31,225 |
| Pages/session | 1.98 | 2.01 | 2.04 | 2.12 | 2.05 | 2.02 |
| Pageviews in sessions with at least 5 pageviews | 12,616 | 16,314 | 26,016 | 12,887 | 13,065 | 20,727 |
Here are pageview counts for the other subject wikis:
- Market: 9,248 pageviews, versus 11,148 for July 2014.
- Calculus: 9,813 pageviews, versus 7,576 for July 2014.
Comparison with forecast: The total number of pageviews for Groupprops (38,388) was just a little short of the lower end of the 50% probability interval (40,000-52,000) and far from the point estimate of 46,000. It was well within the 80% interval estimate of 33,000-60,000 and the 95% interval estimate of 25,000-70,000.
August forecast: In August 2014, Groupprops had a total of 36,844 views. Using the ~10% year-on-year growth seen in July, my point estimate for August is 40,500 pageviews. My 50% probability interval estimate is 33,000-50,000 pageviews. My 80% probability interval estimate is 27,000-60,000 pageviews, and my 95% probability interval estimate is 20,000-70,000 pageviews. (Note that the bulk of Groupprops’ traffic is seen in the months of September-November, while June-August is the slowest season).
Open borders
General background information: My site page about open borders
My blog post titled Can deportation be a key crime-fighting strategy? was published on the site on July 29, 2015. Also, many of the Wikipedia pages I created this month were related to migration policy. Specifically, I created a large number of pages related to various aspects of immigration enforcement, including various types of deportation and removal.
I intend to do 2-4 blog posts for the site this month (posts that are already partly or fully drafted and waiting to go out the door; plus some quick news-type posts). In addition, I hope to get going with bits and pieces of the site revamp, which I currently see as rewriting existing pages to incorporate more recent material and better overall conceptualization of the issue.
Other sites and forms of online presence
- This website (vipulnaik.com) got 2,891 views in the month of July according to Google Analytics (and 1,976 views according to WordPress Analytics). I implemented the spam filter exclusion for the site on July 4, and the count of spam-free views measured by Google Analytics for this date onward is 1,643. Extrapolating based on higher overall traffic in the first couple of days gives a number similar to the WordPress Analytics count.
- The views for Quora content created by me were as follows: about 5500 for questions, about 20000 for answers, and about 200 for posts.
- Wikipedia Views got 1,721 views according to Google Analytics, but excluding spam referrals gave a view count of 298 for the time period July 4 – July 31 (I implemented the spam referral exclusion only on July 4).
Friends’ projects
- AI Impacts, started by Katja Grace and Paul Christiano, and managed primarily by Katja, got 3,826 views.
- Cause Prioritization Wiki, started and managed by Issa Rice, got 1,167 views overall and 1,052 views excluding spam referrals.
Entertainment
I watched Mary Kom. I did not purchase any new music in July.