April 2015 in review

This is the seventh of my month-in-review posts. I started month-in-review posts in October 2014. You can see my first post here.

Some overall background

As expected, this month was extremely busy at my job, so I ended up doing less of other things than I had hoped for (but within the range of my expectations). The coming month (May) will probably be substantially more busy, and I will probably not get time for either Wikipedia editing or writing blog posts or articles. Also, due to a relocation of our company office, I need to spend an extra 20-30 minutes walking to work every day, which will further cut into time I might spend on content creation activities.

Wikipedia editing

For background information, see my site page about Wikipedia

Wikipedia editing was high in the first half of the month, but relatively low in the second half. Much of the editing happened during BART rides, but I also spent a decent fraction of the first two weekends of April on it. The pages I created were largely in my focus areas of migration and effective altruism. Here are the pages I created (you can cross-check here):

  • H-1B1 visa, created Friday, April 3, 2015. It took 1-2 hours to create. It was also my first page about a United States visa.
  • Automatic visa revalidation, created Saturday, April 4, 2015. The page took about 30 minutes to create. It was relatively quick and painless but also correspondingly low-value.
  • Form I-129, created Sunday, April 5, 2015. The page took about two hours.
  • Premium Processing Service, created Sunday, April 5, 2015. The page took about 1-2 hours to create. It again arose out of my interest in better understanding the process and bureaucracy surrounding immigration.
  • The Most Good You Can Do, created Saturday, April 11, 2015. It took 36 minutes to create (clock time from start to end). Despite the short time to create, the page has been getting a decent amount of traffic. However, traffic is likely to decline over time. The page is hot right now because the book was released recently, on Wednesday April 7.
  • 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman, created Wednesday, April 14, 2015. The page was created as part of my effort to understand content that goes viral on social media as elsewhere, a topic of interest to me both professionally and personally.
  • The unique connection, created Friday April 24, 2015. As with the preceding page, this page too was created as part of my effort to understand viral content on the Internet.
  • Facebook Safety Check, created Monday, April 27, 2015. The page was created due to the topicality of Facebook Safety Check in the wake of the 2015 Nepal earthquake. It took about 1.5 hours to create, but much of the time was offline on BART (I was offline on my laptop, and had Internet on my cellphone, and was manually copying URLs and titles, which took longer).

I also made updates to these timeline pages to reflect recent events and changes:

I made significant content changes to these pages (not created by me):

  • H-1B visa: The edits here were to incorporate new information I had gathered as a result of creating many other pages related to US migration.
  • Effective altruism: I noticed that the pageviews for this page had risen quite a bit in late March and early April, likely due to the release of Peter Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do. So I decided to finish a long-standing revamp of the Wikipedia page about effective altruism.
  • If London Were Syria, a viral video titled on YouTube The Most Shocking Second a Day Video.

One of the pages I was planning to create, Woven Digital, got published in main space just a few hours before I started working on my version of it. I was able to port some of the links I had collected to expand the existing page.

April impact: To better understand the impact that pages I had created or edited at particular points in time had at other points in time, I created separate tags for pages I created in each month. So now, it’s possible to access information on pageviews in a particular month (say April 2015) for pages I created in another month (say January 2015). Summing up along one dimension gives total pageviews by month of creation, whereas summing up along the other dimension gives total pageviews by the month of views.

A small caveat before I get into the April numbers. I discovered that a few of the pages I created, specifically SunSaluter, Tullock paradox, and Marginal Revolution University, had not been tagged in Wikipedia Views as pages created by me. Adding in these pages has therefore caused the pageview counts to change for previous months. The change is not significant for most months, but as it turns out, one of these pages (Tullock paradox) got an unexpected surge of traffic in April (5356 views, compared to 365 in March).

Page category Pageviews in April 2015 Pageviews in March 2015 Cumulative pageviews in 2015
Pages I created in April 2015 2473 101 2773
Pages I created in March 2015 2818 1752 4580
Pages I created in 2015 13134 7709 26136
Pages I created over my lifetime 177084 142994 573979

My forecast for the view count in April for all pages I created (bottom row, second column) had been 111,000-167,000 pageviews (80% probability) and 87,000-190,000 pageviews (95% probability). The actual value was 177,084. The count stayed within the 95% interval but was outside the 80% interval. The chief reason for the overshoot was that a few pages got a lot more traffic than expected:

  • Internet.org got 35,004 views, compared to 17,800 views in March 2015. The increase in pageviews was due to its topicality, starting around April 15.
  • Tullock paradox got 5356 views, compared to 365 in March 2015. There appears to have been an unusually large number of pageviews on April 22, perhaps because the page got linked from a high-traffic page.
  • Secret (app) got 5858 views, compared to 4425 in March 2015. The increased views were largely due to the app’s shutdown on April 29 generating news interest in it.
  • Pages I created in April got 2473 views, and pages I had created in late March saw an increase of 1066 in their pageview count from March to April.

May forecast: My point estimate for May pageviews is 151,000 (note that May has 31 days, compared to April which had 30). I estimate an 80% probability that the number of pageviews will fall between 120,000 and 200,000, and a 95% probability that it will fall between 100,000 and 250,000. The reason I’m choosing a lower point estimate for May than for April is that I believe April was unusual largely on account of Internet.org and the Tullock paradox, and previous months have seen lower traffic levels. At the same time, I’m choosing a higher point estimate than the number of pageviews seen in March. I have widened my intervals, and made them more asymmetric (skewed to be larger on the upside) because there is more potential for particular pages to get a lot more traffic than expected (due to topicality) than potential in the other direction. (I also computed view counts for May 1, which came to 5043, and would predict about 156,000 pageviews in May, but I believe this is a slight overestimate because some of the pages I created are still a little more topical right now than they will be for the rest of the month).

Subject wikis

General background information: My site page about the subject wikis

I spent zero time editing the subject wikis this month. Traffic to them grew at its usual steady pace, highlighting that the subject wikis have become sufficiently mature that they don’t need much ongoing supervision.

April impact: I’ve put the numbers for Groupprops in a table for easy perusal and comparison. Numbers are from Google Analytics.

Metric Apr 2015 Mar 2015 Feb 2015 Apr 2014 Mar 2014 Feb 2014
Pageviews 88,046 82,377 73,713 66,233 57,724 57,925
Sessions 43,968 40,280 36,417 34,310 29,249 29,123
Pages/session 2.00 2.05 2.02 1.93 1.97 1.99
Pageviews in sessions with at least 5 pageviews 27,991 27,641 24,338 19,837 17,924 18,354

The total number of pageviews (88,046) in April 2015 was safely within my 80% probability forecast interval of 74,000-103,000, and close to the point estimate of 85,000.

  • Market: 22,432 compared to 23,130 for the same month last year.
  • Calculus: 19,210 compared to 17,555 for the same month last year.

May forecast: Last May, Groupprops had 63,211 pageviews. Given the current year-on-year growth trend of 15-40%, my point estimate for May is 82,000 pageviews. I estimate that with 80% probability, the number of pageviews will fall between 72,000 and 96,000, and that with 95% probability, the number of pageviews will fall between 62,000 and 114,000.

Open borders

General background information: My site page about open borders

No blog post of mine was published, nor did I get time to work on any drafts. However, some of my Wikipedia edits related to migration were indirect preparation for future blog posts. I also did not execute on planned work for the site revamp.

You can see the site’s month-in-review post here.

Other sites and forms of online presence

  • This website (vipulnaik.com) got 2,161 views in the month of April according to Google Analytics (and 2,000 views according to WordPress Analytics), tying with January 2014 for the highest ever.
  • Wikipedia Views got 951 views.
  • Quora: For April, my views were: 13.9K on answers, 12.2K on questions, and 228 on posts. The grand total was 26.4K.

Entertainment

I bought two MP3 songs and watched the movie Ex Machina as part of a team outing.

Server downtime

There was no or negligible server downtime. The servers were up for 99.9%+ of the time. This was a welcome contrast to March, when the servers were down for what amounted to almost an entire day.

March 2015 in review

This is the sixth of my month-in-review posts. My posts for the past five months (in reverse chronological order) are here, here, here, here, here respectively.

Some overall background

This was a pretty busy month work-wise, but I did spend some of my weekend and BART commute time working on some of my personal projects. But I wasn’t able to get as much concentrated time doing big projects as I had wanted to. So I ended up spending time doing relatively smaller pieces of work that I think would help with these longer projects.

The reason I took out as much time as I did for these activities (rather than less, given the workload) is that I don’t anticipate the workload going down in the coming months. And this other stuff needs to get done. Some of it is best done earlier than later (cf. the haste consideration).

Wikipedia editing

General background information: My site page about my Wikipedia contributions

I created 9 pages in March:

The pages related to migration were created by me as part of larger investigations into migration (and my interest in AC21 and the ACWIA was based on the current topicality of the H-1B visa status, that was shaped by these pieces of legislation). The autoscaling page was created in connection with some reading up I was doing on autoscaling in connection with my day job (writing the Wikipedia page wasn’t necessary for work, but when I noticed that such a basic topic didn’t have a page, and I calculated that it would take me less than an hour to write the page, I just went ahead and wrote it). The page on analytics.usa.gov happened because I was poring over those analytics while considering writing a blog post on what the analytics say about interest in migration relative to other subjects (that blog post didn’t happen, but the Wikipedia page did).

March impact: Pages I created over my lifetime got a total of 141,951 views in March. My point estimate for pageviews in March was 139,000, so it seems like I was quite close to the point estimate.

You can see the pageviews by page for the month here. March isn’t yet included because the March 31 data is not yet in. You can also see pageviews for pages I created and all months here, and the corresponding numbers for all years here.

My point estimate had been 139,000, my 80% confidence interval for pageviews had been 111,000-157,000 and my 95% confidence interval is 90,000-175,000. (grade performance relative to estimates).

April forecast: My point estimate for April pageviews is 138,500. My 80% confidence interval estimate is 110,000-167,000, and my 95% confidence interval estimate is 87,000-190,000. The lower ends of the intervals are a little lower because April has only 30 days. My upper ends are higher because the creation of several new pages, some of which are particularly topical for April, might boost my pageview counts somewhat.

Two other miscellaneous pieces of Wikipedia-related content

Two of my pieces, long in the pipeline, got published this month:

  • My blog post on the great decline in Wikipedia pageviews: full version on my blog, condensed version on LessWrong. The post got 11 upvotes (and no downvotes) on LessWrong.
  • My blog post on the Effective Altruism Forum titled Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation?, March 28, 2015. The post got 6 net upvotes (7 upvotes, 1 downvote). According to Google Analytics, it has 293 pageviews and 255 unique pageviews. It is already the 88th most viewed webpage on the site, despite being online for only four days. I hope and expect that it will get a large number of views over time, and its view count will spike during the next Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser. Later views are critically contingent on the page getting ranked better in Google Search than it currently is, or being found and linked to from a more prominent source.

Subject wikis

General background information: My site page about the subject wikis

I spent zero time editing the subject wikis this month. Traffic to them grew at its usual steady pace, highlighting that the subject wikis have become sufficiently mature that they don’t need much ongoing supervision.

March impact: I’ve put the numbers for Groupprops in a table for easy perusal and comparison. Numbers are from Google Analytics.

Metric Mar 2015 Feb 2015 Jan 2015 Mar 2014 Feb 2014 Jan 2014
Pageviews 82,377 73,713 55,121 57,724 57,925 41,989
Sessions 40,280 36,417 26,717 29,249 29,123 21,466
Pages/session 2.05 2.02 2.06 1.97 1.99 1.96
Pageviews in sessions with at least 5 pageviews 27,641 24,338 19,408 17,924 18,354 13,166

Note that March 2014 was an unusual month because, due to math rendering problems, the site had a very small number of pageviews for a period of about 5 days (basically, only those pages that didn’t have math symbols got traffic).

The total number of pageviews in March 2015 was safely within my 80% confidence March forecast interval (75,000-100,000). The number would have been a little higher, and closer to the middle of the interval, if it hadn’t been for the server downtime issues (discussed later in the post).

Views of other important subject wikis:

  • Market: 22,231 views, compared to 20,848 last year (the rendering issue had affected this wiki too last year, but a much smaller subset of pages here).
  • Calculus: 19,750 views, compared to 13,487 last year (the rendering issue had affected this wiki too last year). In addition, for about a week this year (March 5 to March 13), math symbols weren’t displaying correctly, but this didn’t affect the rest of the loading of the pages. The issue went unnoticed because it didn’t cause the site to go down and I don’t check the contents of the wiki sufficiently frequently. It affected about 4,250 pageviews, and so an adjusted measure would be 15,500 pageviews that were not affected by poor math rendering problems. The issue had also affected Groupprops very temporarily but I fixed it more quickly there because of more frequent checking.

April forecast: Last April, Groupprops had 66,233 pageviews. Given the current year-on-year growth trend of 15-40%, my point estimate is 85,000 pageviews, my 80% confidence estimate for Groupprops for April 2015 is 74,000-103,000 pageviews, and my 95% confidence estimate is 60,000-120,000 pageviews.

Open borders

General background information: My site page about open borders

Two of my blog posts were published on Open Borders: The Case. Most of the work in drafting and editing the posts happened within the month.

Additionally, I wrote some of the posts published under the Open Borders Admin account for Open Borders Day (but not the manifesto post — that was done by my co-blogger John Lee).

You can see the site’s month-in-review here.

Other sites and forms of online presence

  • This website (vipulnaik.com) got 2,942 views in the month of March according to Google Analytics (and 2,884 views according to WordPress Analytics), tying with January 2014 for the highest ever.
  • Wikipedia Views got 1,264 views (compared to 627 in January). The additional views were generated partly by me doing research for my blog post about the decline in Wikipedia pageviews and partly by people discovering and exploring the site by following links in that blog post.
  • Quora now breaks views down by questions, answers, and posts. For March, my views were: 12.5K on answers, 11.7K on questions, and 237 on posts. The grand total was 24.4K.

On Facebook

For more background, see my site page about Facebook

Friends’ projects

Server downtime

There were serious server downtime problems on March 4 and March 5, but I figured out a stopgap solution that involved periodically restarting the PHP server so that downtime would not happen for too long. The restart frequency would be set to 5 minutes by default but I could increase it to 1 minute if downtime was getting more frequent (as I did a couple of times later in the month). Coincidentally, XKCD published this comic on Friday March 6. Overall uptime was about 96% for the month, almost entirely due to the problems on March 4 and March 5. There was also a brief downtime on March 31 due to the server running out of disk space, which in turn was due to too many backup files.

In addition to the server downtime, the Calculus Wiki was affected for about a week (March 5 to March 13) by an issue where math symbols wouldn’t display correctly. This didn’t affect the rest of the page loading, but likely led to an inferior user experience. Therefore a large part of the social surplus generated by those pageviews was destroyed for that week. The rendering issue was created when I was trying to fix the server downtime issue by making some hackish code changes, that I then reverted on Groupprops but forgot to revert on Calculus.

Entertainment

I bought just one MP3 song and did not otherwise spend money on entertainment. I did listen to old purchased music and watched snippets from some of my old favorite movies as background stuff while working.

Finances

I had originally intended to do some long-range financial planning in March, with the expectation that my savings would have crossed a threshold large enough to justify such planning. However, a brief review of my savings led me to the conclusion that at this stage it makes sense to just keep accumulating money in my bank account, and then to switch to other, higher-interest-bearing assets, a few months down the line if my savings cross a particular larger threshold. I would refrain from doing such shifting if I decided to make consumption or donation decisions due to which my savings failed to exceed the larger threshold. However, I would not proactively try to spend donate money. Rather, I’d do so only if some unusually good opportunities came up.

Meeting people in real life

I had the pleasure of meeting in real life a number of people I’ve interacted with extensively over the Internet, as I documented on Facebook here, here, and here.

The great decline in Wikipedia pageviews (full version)

A shorter version of this post is available on LessWrong. The LessWrong post will remain static whereas this version will be updated with more examples as they occur to me.

Last year, during the months of June and July, as my work for MIRI was wrapping up and I hadn’t started my full-time job, I worked on the Wikipedia Views website, aimed at easier tabulation of the pageviews for multiple Wikipedia pages over several months and years. It relies on a statistics tool called stats.grok.se, created by Domas Mituzas, and maintained by Henrik.

One of the interesting things I noted as I tabulated pageviews for many different pages was that the pageview counts for many already popular pages were in decline. Pages of various kinds peaked at different historical points. For instance, colors have been in decline since early 2013. The world’s most populous countries have been in decline since as far back as 2010!

Defining the problem

The first thing to be clear about is what these pageviews count and what they don’t. The pageview measures are taken from stats.grok.se, which in turn uses the pagecounts-raw dump provided hourly by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Analytics team, which in turn is obtained by processing raw user activity logs. The pagecounts-raw measure is flawed in two ways:

  • It only counts pageviews on the main Wikipedia website and not pageviews on the mobile Wikipedia website or through Wikipedia Zero (a pared down version of the mobile site that some carriers offer at zero bandwidth costs to their customers, particularly in developing countries). To remedy these problems, a new dump called pagecounts-all-sites was introduced in September 2014. We simply don’t have data for views of mobile domains or of Wikipedia Zero at the level of individual pages for before then. Moreover, stats.grok.se still uses pagecounts-raw (this was pointed to me in a mailing list message after I circulated an early version of the post).
  • The pageview count includes views by bots. The official estimate is that about 15% of pageviews are due to bots. However, the percentage is likely higher for pages with fewer overall pageviews, because bots have a minimum crawling frequency. So every page might have at least 3 bot crawls a day, resulting in a minimum of 90 bot pageviews even if there are only a handful of human pageviews.

Therefore, the trends I discuss will refer to trends in total pageviews for the main Wikipedia website, including page requests by bots, but excluding visits to mobile domains. Note that visits from mobile devices to the main site will be included, but mobile devices are by default redirected to the mobile site.

How reliable are the metrics?

As noted above, the metrics are unreliable because of the bot problem and the issue of counting only non-mobile traffic. German Wikipedia user Atlasowa left a message on my talk page pointing me to an email thread suggesting that about 40% of pageviews may be bot-related, and discussing some interesting examples.

Relationship with the overall numbers

I’ll show that for many pages of interest, the number of pageviews as measured above (non-mobile) has declined recently, with a clear decline from 2013 to 2014. What about the total?

We have overall numbers for non-mobile, mobile, and combined. The combined number has largely held steady, whereas the non-mobile number has declined and the mobile number has risen.

What we’ll find is that the decline for most pages that have been around for a while is even sharper than the overall decline. One reason overall pageviews haven’t declined so fast is the creation of new pages. To give an idea, non-mobile traffic dropped by about 1/3 from January 2013 to December 2014, but for many leading categories of pages, traffic dropped by about 1/2-2/3.

Why is this important? First reason: better context for understanding trends for individual pages

People’s behavior on Wikipedia is a barometer of what they’re interested in learning about. An analysis of trends in the views of pages can provide an important window into how people’s curiosity, and the way they satisfy this curiosity, is evolving. To take an example, some people have proposed using Wikipedia pageview trends to predict flu outbreaks. I myself have tried to use relative Wikipedia pageview counts to gauge changing interests in many topics, ranging from visa categories to technology companies.

My initial interest in pageview numbers arose because I wanted to track my own influence as a Wikipedia content creator. In fact, that was my original motivation with creating Wikipedia Views. (You can see more information about my Wikipedia content contributions on my site page about Wikipedia).

Now, when doing this sort of analysis for individual pages, one needs to account for, and control for, overall trends in the views of Wikipedia pages that are occurring for reasons other than a change in people’s intrinsic interest in the subject. Otherwise, we might falsely conclude from a pageview count decline that a topic is falling in popularity, whereas what’s really happening is an overall decline in the use of (the non-mobile version of) Wikipedia to satisfy one’s curiosity about the topic.

Why is this important? Second reason: a better understanding of the overall size and growth of the Internet.

Wikipedia has been relatively mature and has had the top spot as an information source for at least the last six years. Moreover, unlike almost all other top websites, Wikipedia doesn’t try hard to market or optimize itself, so trends in it reflect a relatively untarnished view of how the Internet and the World Wide Web as a whole are growing, independent of deliberate efforts to manipulate and doctor metrics.

The case of colors

Let’s look at Wikipedia pages on some of the most viewed colors (I’ve removed the 2015 and 2007 columns because we don’t have the entirety of these years). Colors are interesting because the degree of human interest in colors in general, and in particular colors, is unlikely to change much in response to news or current events. So one would at least a priori expect colors to offer a perspective into Wikipedia trends with fewer external complicating factors. If we see a clear decline here, then that’s strong evidence in favor of a genuine decline.

I’ve restricted attention to a small subset of the colors, that includes the most common ones but isn’t comprehensive. But it should be enough to get a sense of the trends. And you can add in your own colors and check that the trends hold up.

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
Black 431K 1.5M 1.3M 778K 900K 1M 958K 6.9M 16.1 Colors
Blue 710K 1.3M 1M 987K 1.2M 1.2M 1.1M 7.6M 17.8 Colors
Brown 192K 284K 318K 292K 308K 300K 277K 2M 4.6 Colors
Green 422K 844K 779K 707K 882K 885K 733K 5.3M 12.3 Colors
Orange 133K 181K 251K 259K 275K 313K 318K 1.7M 4 Colors
Purple 524K 906K 847K 895K 865K 841K 592K 5.5M 12.8 Colors
Red 568K 797K 912K 1M 1.1M 873K 938K 6.2M 14.6 Colors
Violet 56K 96K 75K 77K 69K 71K 65K 509K 1.2 Colors
White 301K 795K 615K 545K 788K 575K 581K 4.2M 9.8 Colors
Yellow 304K 424K 453K 433K 452K 427K 398K 2.9M 6.8 Colors
Total 3.6M 7.1M 6.6M 6M 6.9M 6.5M 6M 43M 100 —
Percentage 8.5 16.7 15.4 14 16 15.3 14 100 — —

Since the decline appears to have happened between 2013 and 2014, let’s examine the 24 months from January 2013 to December 2014:

Month Views of page Black Views of page Blue Views of page Brown Views of page Green Views of page Orange Views of page Purple Views of page Red Views of page Violet Views of page White Views of page Yellow Total Percentage
201412 30K 41K 14K 27K 9.6K 28K 67K 3.1K 21K 19K 260K 2.4
201411 36K 46K 15K 31K 10K 35K 50K 3.7K 23K 22K 273K 2.5
201410 37K 52K 16K 34K 10K 34K 51K 4.5K 25K 26K 289K 2.7
201409 37K 57K 16K 35K 9.9K 37K 45K 4.8K 27K 29K 298K 2.8
201408 33K 47K 14K 34K 8.5K 31K 38K 3.9K 21K 22K 253K 2.4
201407 33K 47K 14K 30K 9.3K 31K 37K 4.2K 22K 22K 250K 2.3
201406 32K 49K 14K 31K 10K 34K 39K 4.9K 23K 22K 259K 2.4
201405 44K 55K 17K 37K 10K 51K 42K 5.2K 26K 26K 314K 2.9
201404 34K 60K 17K 36K 14K 38K 47K 5.8K 27K 28K 306K 2.8
201403 37K 136K 19K 51K 14K 123K 52K 5.5K 30K 31K 497K 4.6
201402 38K 58K 19K 39K 13K 41K 49K 5.6K 29K 29K 321K 3
201401 40K 60K 19K 36K 14K 40K 50K 4.4K 27K 28K 319K 3
201312 62K 67K 17K 44K 12K 48K 48K 4.4K 42K 26K 372K 3.5
201311 141K 96K 20K 65K 11K 68K 55K 5.3K 71K 34K 566K 5.3
201310 145K 102K 21K 69K 11K 77K 59K 5.7K 71K 36K 598K 5.6
201309 98K 80K 17K 60K 11K 53K 51K 4.9K 45K 30K 450K 4.2
201308 109K 87K 20K 57K 20K 57K 60K 4.6K 53K 28K 497K 4.6
201307 107K 92K 21K 61K 11K 66K 65K 4.6K 61K 30K 520K 4.8
201306 115K 106K 22K 69K 13K 73K 64K 5.5K 70K 33K 571K 5.3
201305 158K 122K 24K 79K 14K 83K 69K 11K 77K 39K 677K 6.3
201304 151K 127K 28K 83K 14K 86K 74K 12K 78K 40K 694K 6.4
201303 155K 135K 31K 92K 15K 99K 84K 12K 80K 43K 746K 6.9
201302 152K 131K 31K 84K 28K 95K 84K 17K 77K 41K 740K 6.9
201301 129K 126K 32K 81K 19K 99K 84K 9.6K 70K 42K 691K 6.4
Total 2M 2M 476K 1.3M 314K 1.4M 1.4M 152K 1.1M 728K 11M 100
Percentage 18.1 18.4 4.4 11.8 2.9 13.3 12.7 1.4 10.2 6.8 100 —
Tags Colors Colors Colors Colors Colors Colors Colors Colors Colors Colors — —

As we can see, the decline appears to have begun around March 2013 and then continued steadily till about June 2014, at which numbers stabilized to their lower levels.

A few sanity checks on these numbers:

  • The trends appear to be similar for different colors, with the notable difference that the proportional drop was higher for the more viewed color pages. Thus, for instance, black and blue saw declines from 129K and 126K to 30K and 41K respectively (factors of four and three respectively) from January 2013 to December 2014. Orange and yellow, on the other hand, dropped by factors of close to two. The only color that didn’t drop significantly was red (it dropped from 84K to 67K, as opposed to factors of two or more for other colors), but this seems to have been partly due to an unusually large amount of traffic in the end of 2014. The trend even for red seems to suggest a drop similar to that for orange.
  • The overall proportion of views for different colors comports with our overall knowledge of people’s color preferences: blue is overall a favorite color, and this is reflected in its getting the top spot with respect to pageviews.
  • The pageview decline followed a relatively steady trend, with the exception of some unusual seasonal fluctuation (including an increase in October and November 2013).

One hypothesis that some people might come up with is inter-language substitution: people are substituting away from reading articles in the English-language Wikipedia to other language Wikipedias. But the downward trend is present in many other major language Wikipedias, none of which have the second language status of English.

Here are the numbers for four colors in Spanish (negro = black, azul = blue, rojo = red, blanco = white) for the years 2009-2014 (we exclude 2008 because tracking for the Spanish Wikipedia began only in February 2008):

Year Views of page Negro (color) Views of page Azul Views of page Rojo Views of page Blanco (color) Total Percentage
2014 82K 143K 137K 87K 449K 12.7
2013 123K 275K 274K 123K 795K 22.5
2012 132K 301K 208K 109K 751K 21.2
2011 122K 248K 181K 81K 633K 17.9
2010 94K 213K 142K 61K 510K 14.4
2009 79K 174K 93K 52K 398K 11.3
Total 632K 1.4M 1M 512K 3.5M 100
Percentage 17.9 38.3 29.3 14.5 100 —
Tags — — — — — —
The months of 2013 and 2014:
Month Views of page Negro (color) Views of page Azul Views of page Rojo Views of page Blanco (color) Total Percentage
201412 4.7K 7.5K 7K 4.9K 24K 1.9
201411 7K 9.9K 18K 6.6K 41K 3.3
201410 7.5K 12K 12K 7.8K 39K 3.2
201409 7.7K 13K 13K 8.6K 42K 3.4
201408 6.3K 11K 9K 6.4K 32K 2.6
201407 5.9K 10K 9.9K 6K 32K 2.6
201406 6.7K 12K 11K 7K 37K 2.9
201405 8.2K 14K 13K 8.4K 44K 3.5
201404 7.2K 13K 12K 7.6K 40K 3.2
201403 8.2K 15K 13K 9K 45K 3.6
201402 7.1K 14K 12K 8.4K 41K 3.3
201401 5.3K 11K 9K 6.1K 31K 2.5
201312 5.2K 13K 12K 6.4K 36K 2.9
201311 9.2K 23K 23K 12K 67K 5.4
201310 10K 25K 25K 13K 73K 5.9
201309 8.3K 17K 17K 9.3K 51K 4.1
201308 8.9K 18K 18K 9.6K 55K 4.4
201307 9.9K 20K 21K 10K 61K 4.9
201306 12K 25K 25K 12K 74K 5.9
201305 14K 29K 29K 12K 85K 6.8
201304 13K 29K 30K 3K 75K 6
201303 12K 26K 27K 11K 76K 6.1
201302 11K 26K 26K 13K 76K 6.1
201301 9.9K 25K 21K 10K 66K 5.3
Total 204K 418K 412K 210K 1.2M 100
Percentage 16.4 33.6 33.1 16.9 100 —
Tags — — — — — —

Similarly, here are the pageview counts for the same four colors in French (noir = black, bleu = blue, rouge = red, blanc = white):

The years 2009-2014:

Year Views of page Noir Views of page Bleu Views of page Rouge Views of page Blanc Total Percentage
2014 65K 108K 86K 68K 327K 10.7
2013 157K 184K 125K 110K 576K 18.9
2012 149K 209K 169K 103K 630K 20.6
2011 103K 194K 143K 85K 525K 17.2
2010 116K 195K 122K 100K 534K 17.5
2009 126K 168K 81K 84K 458K 15
Total 716K 1.1M 725K 550K 3M 100
Percentage 23.5 34.7 23.8 18 100 —
Tags — — — — — —

All months in 2013 and 2014:

Month Views of page Noir Views of page Bleu Views of page Rouge Views of page Blanc Total Percentage
201412 4.4K 6.9K 6.6K 4.8K 23K 2.5
201411 4.9K 8.3K 6.8K 5.2K 25K 2.8
201410 7K 9.4K 6.9K 6.6K 30K 3.3
201409 6.5K 9.5K 6.8K 5.9K 29K 3.2
201408 3.9K 6.5K 4.6K 4.1K 19K 2.1
201407 4.3K 7.3K 5.3K 4.6K 22K 2.4
201406 4.4K 8.2K 5.8K 4.6K 23K 2.5
201405 5.9K 9.9K 7.8K 6.9K 31K 3.4
201404 5.6K 10K 7.7K 6.1K 30K 3.3
201403 6.4K 11K 8.9K 6.5K 33K 3.6
201402 5.9K 10K 9.1K 6K 31K 3.5
201401 6K 11K 9.4K 6.7K 33K 3.7
201312 7.1K 11K 9.3K 7.3K 35K 3.9
201311 13K 15K 12K 10K 50K 5.6
201310 12K 15K 11K 9K 47K 5.2
201309 7.9K 11K 7.8K 6.4K 33K 3.7
201308 9.2K 11K 7.1K 5.8K 33K 3.7
201307 11K 12K 7.8K 6.9K 37K 4.1
201306 15K 16K 10K 9.3K 50K 5.5
201305 17K 19K 11K 11K 58K 6.4
201304 16K 19K 7.3K 10K 52K 5.8
201303 17K 20K 14K 11K 62K 6.8
201302 16K 17K 13K 11K 57K 6.3
201301 16K 19K 15K 12K 62K 6.8
Total 222K 293K 210K 178K 903K 100
Percentage 24.6 32.4 23.3 19.7 100 —
Tags — — — — — —

Cognitive biases (a small subset thereof)

For a more niche but still timeless set of pages, I picked cognitive biases:

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
Accentuation effect 3.8K 3.4K 1.3K 0 1 4 2 8.5K 0.2 Cognitive biases
Attentional bias 28K 28K 21K 16K 8.9K 7.1K 5.1K 113K 3.1 Cognitive biases
Availability heuristic 174K 199K 194K 180K 125K 106K 85K 1.1M 29.4 Cognitive biases
Bandwagon effect 173K 258K 231K 196K 217K 189K 136K 1.4M 38.7 Cognitive biases
Base rate fallacy 79K 79K 67K 45K 43K 43K 38K 394K 10.9 Cognitive biases
Choice-supportive bias 23K 25K 18K 14K 13K 11K 9.6K 114K 3.1 Cognitive biases
Clustering illusion 30K 26K 28K 28K 33K 40K 40K 226K 6.3 Cognitive biases
Conjunction fallacy 57K 59K 57K 39K 33K 29K 24K 298K 8.2 Cognitive biases
Total 567K 677K 617K 519K 473K 426K 338K 3.6M 100 —
Percentage 15.7 18.7 17.1 14.4 13.1 11.8 9.3 100 — —

The situation for cognitive biases is qualitatively similar to that for colors: the peak occurred in 2013, and the decline appears to have been between the early months of 2013 and the middle of 2014. Unlike colors, cognitive biases in 2014 still did a lot better than they had done three years ago. Note that, with one exception, all the pages selected here have been around since 2008, and the sole exception doesn’t account for enough pageviews to affect the overall trend.

Geography: continents and subcontinents, countries, and cities

Here are the views of some of the world’s most populated countries between 2008 and 2014, showing that the peak happened as far back as 2010:

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
China 5.7M 6.8M 7.8M 6.1M 6.9M 5.7M 6.1M 45M 9 Countries
India 8.8M 12M 12M 11M 14M 8.8M 7.6M 73M 14.5 Countries
United States 13M 15M 18M 18M 34M 16M 15M 129M 25.7 Countries
Indonesia 5.3M 5.2M 3.7M 3.6M 4.2M 3.1M 2.5M 28M 5.5 Countries
Brazil 4.8M 4.9M 5.3M 5.5M 7.5M 4.9M 4.3M 37M 7.4 Countries
Pakistan 2.9M 4.5M 4.4M 4.3M 5.2M 4M 3.2M 28M 5.7 Countries
Bangladesh 2.2M 2.9M 3M 2.8M 2.9M 2.2M 1.7M 18M 3.5 Countries
Russia 5.6M 5.6M 6.5M 6.8M 8.6M 5.4M 5.8M 44M 8.8 Countries
Nigeria 2.6M 2.6M 2.9M 3M 3.5M 2.6M 2M 19M 3.8 Countries
Japan 4.8M 6.4M 6.5M 8.3M 10M 7.3M 6.6M 50M 10 Countries
Mexico 3.1M 3.9M 4.3M 4.3M 5.9M 4.7M 4.5M 31M 6.1 Countries
Total 59M 69M 74M 74M 103M 65M 59M 502M 100 —
Percentage 11.7 13.8 14.7 14.7 20.4 12.9 11.8 100 — —

Of these countries, China, India and the United States are the most notable. China is the world’s most populous. India has the largest population with some minimal English knowledge and legally (largely) unrestricted Internet access to Wikipedia, while the United States has the largest population with quality Internet connectivity and good English knowledge. Moreover, in China and India, Internet use and access have been growing considerably in the last few years, whereas it has been relatively stable in the United States.

It is interesting that the year with the maximum total pageview count was as far back as 2010. In fact, 2010 was so significantly better than the other years that the numbers beg for an explanation. I don’t have one, but even excluding 2010, we see a declining trend: gradual growth from 2008 to 2011, and then a symmetrically gradual decline. Both the growth trend and the decline trend are quite similar across countries.

We see a similar trend for continents and subcontinents, with a clear peak in 2010 and an otherwise roughly symmetric rise and fall:

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
Africa 2.1M 3.2M 3.6M 3.5M 3.7M 3.5M 3.3M 23M 12.8 Continents and subcontinents
Antarctica 1.6M 2.2M 2.5M 2.3M 2.5M 2.2M 1.9M 15M 8.5 Continents and subcontinents
Asia 1.6M 2.1M 2.1M 2.4M 2.6M 2M 2.1M 15M 8.3 Continents and subcontinents
Asia-Pacific 438K 509K 436K 342K 285K 203K 155K 2.4M 1.3 Continents and subcontinents
Australia 5.6M 7.5M 7.8M 8.7M 11M 7.2M 6.4M 55M 30.5 Countries Continents and subcontinents
Central America 637K 768K 754K 702K 871K 642K 626K 5M 2.8 Continents and subcontinents
East Asia 448K 503K 527K 511K 589K 419K 370K 3.4M 1.9 Continents and subcontinents
Europe 3.3M 3.7M 4.3M 4.4M 6.1M 4.1M 4M 30M 16.8 Continents and subcontinents
North America 1.7M 1.9M 2.2M 2.3M 2.9M 1.9M 1.9M 15M 8.3 Continents and subcontinents
South America 1.2M 1.7M 1.6M 1.6M 2M 1.4M 1.6M 11M 6.2 Continents and subcontinents
South Asia 635K 715K 794K 737K 775K 535K 444K 4.6M 2.6 Continents and subcontinents
Total 19M 25M 27M 27M 34M 24M 23M 179M 100 —
Percentage 10.8 14 14.8 15.3 18.9 13.5 12.7 100 — —

In contrast with these large geographic entities, their smaller counterparts, such as cities, peaked in 2013, similarly to colors, and the drop, though somewhat less steep than with colors, has been quite significant. Below is a list for Indian cities:

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
Ahmedabad 416K 756K 629K 422K 359K 258K 235K 3.1M 3.3 Cities Indian cities
Ajmer 152K 223K 257K 133K 86K 62K 53K 966K 1 Indian cities
Allahabad 221K 391K 325K 209K 188K 126K 92K 1.6M 1.7 Indian cities
Ambala 74K 101K 87K 53K 41K 34K 27K 417K 0.4 Indian cities
Bangalore 1.2M 2M 1.7M 1.3M 1.1M 985K 825K 9.1M 9.7 Cities Indian cities
Bhopal 254K 355K 316K 259K 218K 159K 123K 1.7M 1.8 Indian cities
Chandigarh 425K 624K 596K 406K 341K 253K 219K 2.9M 3.1 Indian cities
Chennai 975K 1.5M 1.3M 1.1M 980K 702K 683K 7.3M 7.8 Cities Indian cities
Dehradun 210K 391K 348K 175K 136K 105K 91K 1.5M 1.6 Indian cities
Delhi 1.1M 1.5M 1.6M 1.3M 1.2M 863K 888K 8.6M 9.1 Cities Indian cities
Gandhinagar 108K 160K 134K 86K 70K 47K 34K 639K 0.7 Indian cities
Guwahati 231K 328K 279K 172K 121K 82K 69K 1.3M 1.4 Indian cities
Hyderabad 752K 394K 79K 86K 90K 120K 161K 1.7M 1.8 Cities Indian cities
Jaipur 456K 700K 693K 472K 372K 294K 269K 3.3M 3.5 Indian cities
Jamshedpur 188K 276K 258K 179K 132K 85K 69K 1.2M 1.3 Indian cities
Kanpur 223K 272K 311K 241K 175K 113K 91K 1.4M 1.5 Cities Indian cities
Kochi 308K 528K 352K 245K 96K 27K 27K 1.6M 1.7 Indian cities
Kolkata 965K 1.3M 1.2M 901K 791K 534K 482K 6.2M 6.6 Cities Indian cities
Lucknow 381K 515K 503K 376K 308K 218K 191K 2.5M 2.7 Indian cities
Mumbai 1.8M 2.6M 2.8M 2.9M 2.2M 1.9M 2.4M 17M 17.7 Cities Indian cities
Nagpur 252K 393K 364K 238K 177K 120K 112K 1.7M 1.8 Indian cities
Patna 192K 272K 270K 251K 166K 113K 95K 1.4M 1.5 Indian cities
Pondicherry 283K 497K 628K 111K 84K 103K 96K 1.8M 1.9 Indian cities
Pune 570K 1M 850K 625K 538K 382K 359K 4.4M 4.7 Cities Indian cities
Ranchi 140K 231K 186K 110K 86K 59K 48K 860K 0.9 Indian cities
Shimla 360K 510K 570K 289K 210K 155K 126K 2.2M 2.4 Indian cities
Srinagar 210K 297K 294K 149K 136K 93K 81K 1.3M 1.3 Indian cities
Surat 252K 364K 327K 232K 194K 133K 109K 1.6M 1.7 Cities Indian cities
Thiruvananthapuram 252K 435K 359K 255K 211K 132K 107K 1.8M 1.9 Indian cities
Varanasi 597K 710K 713K 457K 370K 301K 241K 3.4M 3.6 Indian cities
Total 13M 20M 18M 14M 11M 8.6M 8.4M 94M 100 —
Percentage 14.4 21.1 19.6 14.7 12 9.2 9 100 — —

Some niche topics where pageviews haven’t declined

So far, we’ve looked at topics where pageviews have been declining since at least 2013, and some that peaked as far back as 2010. There are, however, many relatively niche topics where the number of pageviews has stayed roughly constant. But this stability itself is a sign of decay, because other metrics suggest that the topics have experienced tremendous growth in interest. In fact, the stability is even less impressive when we notice that it’s a result of a cancellation between slight declines in views of established pages in the genre, and traffic going to new pages.

For instance, consider some charity-related pages:

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
Against Malaria Foundation 5.9K 6.3K 4.3K 1.4K 2 0 0 18K 15.6 Charities
Development Media International 757 0 0 0 0 0 0 757 0.7 Pages created by Vipul Naik Charities
Deworm the World Initiative 2.3K 277 0 0 0 0 0 2.6K 2.3 Charities Pages created by Vipul Naik
GiveDirectly 11K 8.3K 2.6K 442 0 0 0 22K 19.2 Charities Pages created by Vipul Naik
International Council for the Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders 1.2K 1 2 2 0 1 2 1.2K 1.1 Charities Pages created by Vipul Naik
Nothing But Nets 5.9K 6.6K 6.6K 5.1K 4.4K 4.7K 6.1K 39K 34.2 Charities
Nurse-Family Partnership 2.9K 2.8K 909 30 8 72 63 6.8K 5.9 Pages created by Vipul Naik Charities
Root Capital 3K 2.5K 414 155 51 1.2K 21 7.3K 6.3 Charities Pages created by Vipul Naik
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 4K 2.7K 1.6K 191 0 0 0 8.5K 7.4 Charities Pages created by Vipul Naik
VillageReach 1.7K 1.9K 2.2K 2.6K 97 3 15 8.4K 7.3 Charities Pages created by Vipul Naik
Total 38K 31K 19K 9.9K 4.6K 5.9K 6.2K 115K 100 —
Percentage 33.4 27.3 16.3 8.6 4 5.1 5.4 100 — —

For this particular cluster of pages, we see the totals growing robustly year-on-year. But a closer look shows that the growth isn’t that impressive. Whereas earlier, views were doubling every year from 2010 to 2013 (this was the take-off period for GiveWell and effective altruism), the growth from 2013 to 2014 was relatively small. And about half the growth from 2013 to 2014 was powered by the creation of new pages (including some pages created after the beginning of 2013, so they had more months in a mature state in 2014 than in 2013), while the other half was powered by growth in traffic to existing pages.

The data for philanthropic foundations demonstrates a fairly slow and steady growth (about 5% a year), partly due to the creation of new pages. This 5% hides a lot of variation between individual pages:

Page name Pageviews in year 2014 Pageviews in year 2013 Pageviews in year 2012 Pageviews in year 2011 Pageviews in year 2010 Pageviews in year 2009 Pageviews in year 2008 Total Percentage Tags
Atlantic Philanthropies 11K 11K 12K 10K 9.8K 8K 5.8K 67K 2.1 Philanthropic foundations
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 336K 353K 335K 315K 266K 240K 237K 2.1M 64.9 Philanthropic foundations
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation 1.2K 25 9 0 0 0 0 1.2K 0 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Ford Foundation 110K 91K 100K 90K 100K 73K 61K 625K 19.5 Philanthropic foundations
Good Ventures 9.9K 8.6K 3K 0 0 0 0 21K 0.7 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Jasmine Social Investments 2.3K 1.8K 846 0 0 0 0 5K 0.2 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Laura and John Arnold Foundation 3.7K 13 0 1 0 0 0 3.7K 0.1 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Mulago Foundation 2.4K 2.3K 921 0 1 1 10 5.6K 0.2 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Omidyar Network 26K 23K 19K 17K 19K 13K 11K 129K 4 Philanthropic foundations
Peery Foundation 1.8K 1.6K 436 0 0 0 0 3.9K 0.1 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation 26K 26K 26K 22K 27K 22K 17K 167K 5.2 Philanthropic foundations
Skoll Foundation 13K 11K 9.2K 7.8K 9.6K 5.8K 4.3K 60K 1.9 Philanthropic foundations
Smith Richardson Foundation 8.7K 3.5K 3.8K 3.6K 3.7K 3.5K 2.9K 30K 0.9 Philanthropic foundations
Thiel Foundation 3.6K 1.5K 1.1K 47 26 1 0 6.3K 0.2 Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik
Total 556K 533K 511K 466K 435K 365K 340K 3.2M 100 —
Percentage 17.3 16.6 15.9 14.5 13.6 11.4 10.6 100 — —
Here’s a closer look at this same list, restricted to the months from January 2013 to December 2014:
Month Views of page Atlantic Philanthropies Views of page Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Views of page Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Views of page Ford Foundation Views of page Good Ventures Views of page Jasmine Social Investments Views of page Laura and John Arnold Foundation Views of page Mulago Foundation Views of page Omidyar Network Views of page Peery Foundation Views of page Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Views of page Skoll Foundation Views of page Smith Richardson Foundation Views of page Thiel Foundation Total Percentage
201412 753 25K 139 6.4K 1.7K 171 382 184 1.5K 138 1.9K 907 343 399 39K 3.6
201411 886 27K 137 7.3K 679 179 448 200 2.2K 147 1.9K 1K 629 483 43K 4
201410 821 32K 138 7.1K 910 181 437 226 1.6K 153 2.2K 1.1K 1.2K 450 48K 4.4
201409 1.3K 30K 126 7.3K 842 315 489 226 2.1K 141 2.4K 1.1K 1.4K 453 49K 4.5
201408 958 26K 122 5.6K 806 190 466 190 2K 141 1.9K 949 722 302 41K 3.7
201407 866 21K 161 6.9K 774 195 398 213 1.8K 200 2.1K 1.1K 757 267 37K 3.4
201406 856 21K 112 6.7K 714 193 371 241 2.4K 174 2.3K 1K 757 373 38K 3.5
201405 904 32K 78 9.1K 776 187 273 193 3.5K 135 2.4K 990 726 233 51K 4.7
201404 839 28K 87 10K 680 171 277 195 2.2K 159 2.5K 1.3K 772 278 48K 4.4
201403 847 33K 82 13K 941 249 158 275 2.9K 184 2.4K 1.2K 701 202 56K 5.2
201402 691 30K 2 11K 552 149 9 145 2K 130 2.3K 965 410 102 48K 4.4
201401 832 31K 1 20K 532 148 7 154 1.9K 119 2.2K 1.4K 274 77 59K 5.4
201312 812 25K 1 7.4K 563 138 4 140 1.8K 141 1.7K 893 262 95 38K 3.5
201311 691 27K 1 6.9K 470 137 2 136 1.8K 116 2.3K 1K 233 75 41K 3.8
201310 825 27K 0 6.9K 589 167 3 149 3.4K 162 2.1K 881 316 85 42K 3.9
201309 707 27K 3 6.5K 758 142 3 284 1.9K 133 1.8K 872 274 114 40K 3.7
201308 834 23K 4 6K 730 149 0 196 2.5K 124 1.8K 822 242 149 37K 3.4
201307 1.1K 22K 3 6.6K 672 152 0 194 2.2K 127 1.9K 817 289 167 36K 3.3
201306 944 26K 1 8.2K 493 148 0 169 1.9K 119 2K 865 256 155 42K 3.8
201305 861 38K 4 8.7K 1K 147 1 174 1.6K 104 2.4K 941 328 173 54K 5
201304 863 33K 2 8.5K 703 133 0 180 1.5K 130 2.5K 1.1K 341 121 49K 4.5
201303 946 37K 2 8.6K 1.3K 161 0 214 1.5K 183 2.5K 939 319 146 54K 4.9
201302 897 34K 1 7.9K 623 186 0 276 1.6K 156 2.3K 808 294 116 50K 4.5
201301 1.1K 34K 3 8.9K 568 173 0 160 1.6K 119 2.4K 763 371 102 50K 4.6
Total 21K 689K 1.2K 201K 18K 4.2K 3.7K 4.7K 50K 3.4K 52K 24K 12K 5.1K 1.1M 100
Percentage 1.9 63.2 0.1 18.5 1.7 0.4 0.3 0.4 4.6 0.3 4.8 2.2 1.1 0.5 100 —
Tags Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Philanthropic foundations Pages created by Vipul Naik — —

We see that even though the overall number didn’t decline from 2013 to 2014, there was a decline from March 2013 to June 2014 for most pages, as we saw with colors.

The dominant hypothesis: shift from non-mobile to mobile Wikipedia use

The dominant hypothesis is that pageviews have simply migrated from non-mobile to mobile. This is most closely borne by the overall data: total pageviews have remained roughly constant, and the decline in total non-mobile pageviews has been roughly canceled by growth in mobile pageviews. However, the evidence for this substitution doesn’t exist at the level of individual pages because we don’t have pageview data for the mobile domain before September 2014, and much of the decline occurred between March 2013 and June 2014.

What would it mean if there were an approximate one-on-one substitution from non-mobile to mobile for the page types discussed above? For instance, non-mobile traffic to colors dropped to somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of their original traffic level between January 2013 and December 2014. This would mean that somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the original non-mobile traffic to colors has shifted to mobile devices. This theory should be at least partly falsifiable: if the sum of traffic to non-mobile and mobile platforms today for colors is less than non-mobile-only traffic in January 2013, then clearly substitution is only part of the story.

Although the data is available, it’s not currently in an easily computable form, and I don’t currently have the time and energy to extract it. I’ll update this once the data on all pageviews since September 2014 is available on stats.grok.se or a similar platform.

Other hypotheses

The following are some other hypotheses for the pageview decline:

  1. Google’s Knowledge Graph: This is the hypothesis raised in Wikipediocracy, the Daily Dot, and the Register. The Knowledge Graph was introduced in 2012. Through 2013, Google rolled out snippets (called Knowledge Cards and Knowledge Panels) based on the Knowledge Graph in its search results. So if, for instance, you only wanted the birth date and nationality of a musician, Googling would show you that information right in the search results and you wouldn’t need to click through to the Wikipedia page. I suspect that the Knowledge Graph played some role in the decline for colors seen between March 2013 and June 2014. On the other hand, many of the pages that saw a decline don’t have any search snippets based on the Knowledge Graph, and therefore the decline for those pages cannot be explained this way.
  2. Other means of accessing Wikipedia’s knowledge that don’t involve viewing it directly: For instance, Apple’s Siri tool uses data from Wikipedia, and people making queries to this tool may get information from Wikipedia without hitting the encyclopedia. The usage of such tools has increased greatly starting in late 2012. Siri itself was released with the third generation iPad in September 2012 and became part of the iPhone released the next month. Since then, it has shipped with all of Apple’s mobile devices and tablets.
  3. Substitution away from Wikipedia to other pages that are becoming more search-optimized and growing in number: For many topics, Wikipedia may have been clearly the best information source a few years back (as judged by Google), but the growth of niche information sources, as well as better search methods, have displaced it from its undisputed leadership position. I think there’s a lot of truth to this, but it’s hard to quantify.
  4. Substitution away from coarser, broader pages to finer, narrower pages within Wikipedia: While this cannot directly explain an overall decline in pageviews, it can explain a decline in pageviews for particular kinds of pages. Indeed, I suspect that this is partly what’s going on with the early decline of pageviews (e.g., the decline in pageviews of countries and continents starting around 2010, as people go directly to specialized articles related to the particular aspects of those countries or continents they are interested in).
  5. Substitution to Internet use in other languages: This hypothesis doesn’t seem borne out by the simultaneous decline in pageviews for the English, French, and Spanish Wikipedia, as documented for the color pages.

It’s still a mystery

I’d like to close by noting that the pageview decline is still very much a mystery as far as I am concerned. I hope I’ve convinced you that (a) the mystery is genuine, (b) it’s important, and (c) although the shift to mobile is probably the most likely explanation, we don’t yet have clear evidence. I’m interested in hearing whether people have alternative explanations, and/or whether they have more compelling arguments for some of the explanations proffered here.

About blog posts

I use the blog section of this website as a personal web log (blog in the original sense of the word). It’s a record of things I’ve done, the impact I’ve had, and my plans for the future. I don’t go into great detail regarding any particular item, instead preferring to link to the relevant external link describing either the data or my own opinion.

I don’t expect the blog section to be of wide interest to readers. The main reason I’m making it public is that I expect that some people would find it interesting, either at present or in historical perspective.

February 2015 in review

This is the fifth of my month-in-review posts. My posts for the past four months (in reverse chronological order) are here, here, here, here respectively.

Some overall background

The month was busy for me as usual. Work picked up, as our company got a bunch of new clients. Thus, my online non-work output declined considerably relative to January.

The month of March will be even busier work-wise, so it’s highly likely that my March 2015 review will be a lot shorter because I won’t have time to get much non-work stuff done. That said, I do hope to finish a couple of long pending items, the most important of which is the (long pending) Open Borders: The Case site revamp.

Wikipedia editing

General background information: My site page about my Wikipedia contributions

I created four new pages in February:

Each of these pages took about 1-2 hours to create, a little more than my usual time taken to create pages of this sort. This was partly because the new nature of topic meant that information sources were a little harder to find and connect into a coherent narrative.

I created these pages as part of a recurring interest in understanding two key components of the economy: agriculture and finance. The first page was also related to my interest in migration, specifically understanding migrant labor in the US agricultural sector.

The majority of the work creating and editing these pages was done during BART rides. However, unlike January, a fairly small fraction of BART rides was devoted to Wikipedia editing. That’s part of the reason my Wikipedia throughput this month was small relative to last month.

In addition, I made minor edits to other pages, such as to the Sandler Foundation page to cite external coverage of the foundation, including coverage by GiveWell.

February impact: Pages I’ve created over my lifetime got a total of 130,493 pageviews in February 2015. You can see the pageviews by page for the month here. You can also see pageviews for pages I created and all months here, and the corresponding numbers for all years here.

The total number of pageviews just slightly exceeded the upper bound of my 80% confidence interval (107,000-130,000) (that I provided in my January 2015 review) despite there being no significant surprises with regards to pageviews. This suggests the need for widening confidence intervals.

As for pages edited significantly but not created by me, the number of pageviews was 87,525, notably less than what I’d expected (about 100,000).

March forecast: Given that my February forecast appears to have been too narrow, I’ll aim for a wider forecast for March. For pages I’ve created, my point estimate is 139,000, my 80% confidence interval for pageviews is 111,000-157,000 and my 95% confidence interval is 90,000-175,000.

Subject wikis

General background information: My site page about the subject wikis

I spent zero time editing the subject wikis this month. Traffic to them grew at its usual steady pace, highlighting that the subject wikis have become sufficiently mature that they don’t need much ongoing supervision.

February impact: I’ve put the numbers for Groupprops in a table for easy perusal and comparison. Numbers are from Google Analytics.

Metric Feb 2015 Jan 2015 Dec 2014 Feb 2014 Jan 2014 Dec 2013
Pageviews 73,713 55,121 77,725 57,925 41,989 60,232
Sessions 36,417 26,717 36,147 29,123 21,466 28,769
Pages/session 2.02 2.06 2.15 1.99 1.96 2.09
Pageviews in sessions with at least 5 pageviews 24,338 19,408 28,641 18,354 13,166 20,793

The total number of pageviews (73,713) was near the middle of my 80% confidence February forecast interval (68,000-80,000) made in my January 2015 review.

Views of other important subject wikis:

  • Market: 20,704 pageviews, compared with 20,053 for February of last year. It’s fairly stagnant. An increase in pageviews would probably be contingent on content expansion, something I hope to get to after achieving specific milestones with Open Borders: The Case.
  • Calculus: 19,539 pageviews, compared with 16,193 for February of last year.

March forecast: Last March, there had been a site issue where pages with math in them had failed to render properly for a short period of about four days. Therefore traffic last year (57,724 pageviews) is less than it should have been (about 64,000). Adjusting for this, and what seems like an year-on-year growth of 20-40%, my 80% confidence interval for the number of pageviews this March is 75,000-100,000.

Open borders

General background information: My site page about open borders

Four of my blog posts were published on Open Borders: The Case. Most of the work in drafting and editing the posts happened within the month.

You might also want to check out the site’s month-in-review.

Plan for March: I hope to spend practically all my off-work hours on completing the site revamp, which has been pending in a partial state for quite a while now.

Server downtime

Server performance this month was a lot better than last month, with a total of about 40 minutes of downtime on February 24/25. Overall uptime was 99.9%.

Stuff by others I’m loosely involved with

Entertainment

I bought the first season of the Mary Tyler Moore show, which I find an interesting sitcom given its historical importance (the most famous line in it being the pilot “You’ve got spunk!” line, which is how I originally discovered the show). I didn’t get time to watch much of the show, though — I watched about four episodes. It’s a nice show but I don’t know if it’s good enough to be worth finishing, and I probably won’t buy other seasons for a while. Unlike Gilmore Girls, it’s not really that “realistic” — this is partly because it’s a sitcom and therefore intended to be unrealistic, and partly also because it’s from an era farther back in time that is harder to relate to.

I also bought a few more MP3 songs, including Humdard from Ek Villain and two songs by Shakira: Hips Don’t Lie (apparently the best selling single of the 21st Century) and Whenever, Wherever. This was my first time properly listening to Shakira, and I enjoyed it.

I’ve been reading the recently released chapters of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR), which I found interesting though not as gripping as I used to find HPMOR. (This isn’t because of a decline in quality of HPMOR, but because I’m preoccupied with many other things these days).

Bureaucratic activities

Although I was basically done with my taxes at the end of last month, I kept postponing the proofreading and final submission, as other, more urgent, stuff kept coming up. In the last week of February, I finally got a chance to proofread my federal taxes. I intend to send them off today (March 1). I also filed my California and Illinois taxes online.

January 2015 in review

This is the fourth of my month-in-review posts. My posts for the past three months (in reverse chronological order) are here, here, here respectively.

Some overall background

I had some time off my job in December 2014, due to end-of-year leanness in work, and I used this time to draft many Open Borders: The Case blog posts. Work has reverted this month to a level comparable with November or the first half of December, and is likely to increase to unprecedented levels in the next few months. My high apparent output on various projects in January is largely a result of material I put in the pipeline in December, as well as due to a shift in priorities away from relaxation and entertainment and towards online publication.

Wikipedia editing

General background information: My site page about my Wikipedia contributions

I created a number of Wikipedia pages this month, including:

  • Chartbeat, a real-time analytics service.
  • AirPair, a service that connects people who need coding help with those who can help them for one-on-one guidance.
  • ZenPayroll, a company that facilitates payroll, and is particularly cost-effective for small companies.
  • Zenefits, a company that facilitates group health insurance and human resource management for companies.
  • AdChoices, a program for advertisers to offer users choices on whether they personalize the ads they serve to users.
  • Labor Condition Application, an application whose approval needs to be submitted for H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 petitions.

I got interested in these topics in the course of research or reading I was doing in relation to personal projects, my job, and bureaucratic formalities.

About half of these pages were made during BART rides, at the rate of about one page per ride (the ride for me, between the Ashby BART and the 16th Street/Mission Street BART, lasts about 30 minutes). Although I don’t have Internet access on BART on my laptop (my phone has its own Internet access but can’t create a Wi-Fi hotspot), I opened up a bunch of related links just before departing, and pieced them together during the ride. (See also my efficiency tips page).

I also updated some timeline pages on Wikipedia:

I did the first three updates on Sunday January 25, over a stretch of time of approximately 1.5 hours. The next two were done during BART rides, using the modus operandi described above. The last one (the timeline of PayPal) took several BART rides, because I had several years of information (2009-2014) to fill, and PayPal is a lot bigger and more important than Airbnb and Pinterest.

I also made some changes to the Optional Practical Training Wikipedia page in the course of research I did for my blog post about Optional Practical Training.

I had toyed with the idea of making Wikipedia pages on many other topics, but ultimately decided against it due to lack of time. Some of the pages I shelved aside were:

  • Company pages: Instacart, SimplyInsured
  • Timeline pages: LinkedIn, Uber, Zipcar, Zynga, Instagram, Secret (app)
  • Visa pages: H-1B1 visa (a variant of the H-1B visa), the N visas

Given the increasing pace of my work, as well as my other commitments, I don’t know if I’ll get time to pursue any of these possibilities in the near future.

One of the reasons I like using the BART rides for Wikipedia editing rather than other tasks is that it’s relatively mechanical and doesn’t really require me to be online. Another candidate for BART rides is Open Borders: The Case blog posts, but these generally require some Internet access insofar as drafting the posts raises new lines of inquiry that need to be answered through a web search. I’ve also used BART rides for coding work related to my job, but that often requires more concentration and I generally do it only if I really want to get it done or I’m not too fatigued.

January impact: Over the month, Wikipedia pages I’ve created over my lifetime got a total of 121,366 views. You can access the full details here. One of the pages I created, namely Park Yeon-mi, has been edited beyond recognition, and it also had a large number of pageviews (9,588 views over the month). Therefore, it may be fair to exclude it from the total, bringing the total down to 111,778 views.

For pages I have significantly edited but did not create, the total pageview count in the month of January was 100,228 (you can access full details here).

February forecast: I expect a fairly similar number for pages I created, but a spike for pages I edited but didn’t create, largely due to Facebook’s anniversary driving traffic to the timeline of Facebook page. But that spike will be only a few thousand pages and may be overwhelmed by other factors.

Controlling for the shorter length of the month, I expect the February number for pages I created to be modestly better than the January number, because some of the pages I created at the end of January have been getting a decent number of pageviews. My February point estimate is 117,000, my 80% confidence interval is 105,000-130,000, and my 95% confidence interval is 95,000-150,000 (revise all numbers downward by about 10,000 if the Park Yeon-mi page is to be excluded).

Subject wikis

General background information: My site page about the subject wikis

For a few hours one weekend, I spent some “relaxation” time browsing and making edits to Groupprops. I also fixed some errors in Groupprops and other subject wikis reported through the online error reporting form. You can see the error fixes in the site’s error log.

Once I’ve accomplished some specific goals with my work on Open Borders: The Case, I intend to devote more systematic time to the subject wikis. This time will probably be directed at Calculus, Market, and a nascent machine learning wiki, but I will probably keep returning to Groupprops, if only to revisit some of my organizational choices there when seeking inspiration for the newer wikis.

January impact: I’ve put the numbers for Groupprops in a table for easy perusal and comparison. Numbers are from Google Analytics.

Metric January 2015 December 2014 January 2014 December 2013
Pageviews 55,121 77,725 41,989 60,232
Sessions 26,717 36,147 21,466 28,769
Pages/session 2.06 2.15 1.96 2.09
Pageviews in sessions with at least 5 pageviews 19,408 28,641 13,166 20,793

As you can see, January numbers are generally lower than corresponding December numbers, but there has been robust year-on-year growth and the January-to-December ratios have been about the same between the two years. (If you’re wondering why the January number is lower than the December number, this has to do with the nature of the academic year. Traffic to Groupprops is higher in the months that people are more likely to be studying and reviewing group theory in their college mathematics courses).

February forecast: February 2014 saw 57,925 views. Assuming the overall trend of a 20-35% year-on-year increase continues, the February pageview count will be in 69,000-80,000 pageview range. This is my 80% confidence interval. My 95% confidence interval is 55,000-90,000 pageviews.

Open borders

General background information: My site page about open borders

Open Borders: The Case had its third highest traffic month (the two highest traffic months were November and December 2014).

A number of my blog posts (most of them drafted in December) were published on the site in January. Each post took about two hours for primary drafting and then 1-2 hours of editing and improvement spread out over several weeks:

I also revamped some of the site pages, such as double world GDP and place premium.

Open Borders: The Case will publish its own monthly review. I’ll link to that from here once it is published.

Server downtime

The server where I host vipulnaik.com, the subject wikis, and Open Borders: The Case had intermittent troubles through the month. While I’m still not sure of the core causes of the troubles, it seems like one possible culprit was logging to large log files that was slowing the system down. I made a number of server configuration changes that should hopefully address the downtime. Estimated traffic loss due to the misconfigurations is about 1%.

Bureaucratic activities

  • I wrote three recommendation letters for students applying for scholarships and internships. These are students I taught in 2013 or earlier while at the University of Chicago.
  • I finished my US taxes for 2014 and intend to file them next Saturday. I have it ready for filing but want to give it a closer look before I do the final sending, because errors are hard to correct. A few unexpected issues that arose: it took me time to figure out how to handle 1099 contractor income (but I finally figured it out). Second, just as I thought my taxes were done, I got a W-2 from the University of Chicago for a payment they made to me in January 2014, that had been associated with work I had done in December 2013. I needed to incorporate that information into my tax return.
  • I started corresponding with the company lawyers regarding my H-1B petition.

Other websites and activity

Just for the record, here are pageview counts (total for the month of January) of my other websites:

  • My personal website (vipulnaik.com) where you’re probably reading this review: 2,432 views according to WordPress, 2,351 according to Google Analytics.
  • My Quora stats (total views of my questions and answers): About 16,400 views.
  • Cognito Mentoring, a website made collaboratively with Jonah Sinick (see here): 1,012 views according to WordPress, 951 according to Google Analytics.
  • Cognito Mentoring Info Wiki: 1,946 views according to Google Analytics.

Awesome stuff by people I know, that I might have influenced or might be able to influence

The people I know have been up to some exciting stuff this month:

  • Issa Rice, a former mentee of Cognito Mentoring (read his review here) has been making progress on the Cause Prioritization Wiki, that he aims to make the web’s go-to resource for effective altruists (and others) interested in understanding and comparing top causes to invest time and money in. I take credit for being the one to originally suggest cause prioritization as a promising domain for him to look into, and encouraging/nagging Issa to execute on his vision in the area. The wiki recorded 418 views in Google Analytics. However, this does not filter out Issa’s own views.
  • Katja Grace officially lanched the AI Impacts website earlier this month, and has been busy blogging there. I played no particular role in creating or funding the site, but Katja has been keeping me updated of progress on it, and I’ve offered the occasional suggestion. I did suggest to her that this was a more promising thing to focus on than other alternative activities (although she likely would have chosen to do it anyway). This recorded 1,673 views in January since Google Analytics tracking was launched on January 12.
  • Sebastian Nickel, one of my closest Facebook friends, officially launched a blog section of his website.

Personal: diet, sleep, exercise, and entertainment

For more on my daily routine, see here (password-protected, but feel free to let me know if you’re interested)

My sleep patterns were a bit disrupted. I tend to wake up based on sunlight, so the fact that the sun rises later in January meant that I’d tend to wake up later. This in turn led me to sleep later. It didn’t help that in the last week of December, I often stayed up late during the holidays as I was pondering some matters.

The late waking up meant that on about a third of the weekdays this month I didn’t have time for my morning jog. However, towards the end of the month I’d started getting the situation under control, and I hope to make my morning exercise a regular and reliable fixture of my existence once again.

Diet patterns were good — I cooked enough that I didn’t need to eat out except once on Saturday and the company lunches. Although I still went out on occasional dinners with other people, this was a matter of choice rather than of running out of cooked food at home. On the other hand, I did end up having more expensive hot chocolates in San Francisco than usual.

As had been the case in December, I didn’t buy or watch any new movies or read any new books. I did buy one new MP3 song. I also kept some old movies and music bought earlier running in the background when I worked on weekends and occasionally in the office.

December 2014 in review

This is the third of my month-in-review posts. My first post, for October 2014, is here. My second post, for November 2014, is here. I made significant style changes between the October and November posts, that I believe were improvements. I plan to do this post in a style similar to November’s.

Job

General background information: My site page about my job

Things were busy in the first few weeks of the month, but relatively relaxed in the last ten days of so, and I took a few days off after Christmas Day (December 25), making for an extended weekend. Working at a small startup with clients, some of whom get a lot of traffic, I try to generally be online and available in case of emergencies. Fortunately, things proceeded smoothly this past week, and I devoted quite a bit of time to personal projects.

Other personal developments

My application for the STEM extension to Optional Practical Training, that I filed back in October, was approved on December 16. I received my new EAD card on December 21. This extends my authorized status in the United States to June 2016. You can see more details here.

Now that my bank balance has crossed a basic threshold, I decided to switch some of my savings into other currencies. I bought some Bitcoins via Coinbase. Around March 2015, I intend to put some money into a stock market index fund.

Unlike some previous years, I chose not to make any charitable donations this year. The reasons are complicated, and something I intend to write a blog post about at the Effective Altruism Forum (you can see related posts by me in the Effective Altruists Facebook group here and here respectively, though my thinking has evolved quite a bit since then). I had not made any charitable donations in 2013 either. However, through November and December, I did put some of my money into an informal fund used to promote Open Borders: The Case content on Facebook. I intend to make some other minimal expenditures related to the site in 2015, and I do not intend to make any philanthropic donations this coming year. However, my plans and goals might change. I’ll keep my site’s page on effective altruism updated with a list of all my relevant posts, and will also update my donation history page if I make additional donations, as well as at the end of next year if I choose not to.

Wikipedia editing

General background information: My site page about my Wikipedia contributions

I didn’t create any new Wikipedia pages this month. There were a few pages I had been considering creating, but other items were higher on my priority list.

I did make a few edits. Charity evaluator GiveWell published their updated list of top charities on December 1. Within the next two weeks, I made updates to the Wikipedia pages about GiveWell, their partner Good Ventures, as well as their four recommended charities (Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, and Deworm the World Initiative) and four standout charities (Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, International Council for the Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders, Living Goods, and Development Media International).

I also noted in a Facebook post that I was the original creator of the Wikipedia pages for three of the four recommended charities (Against Malaria Foundation being the exception) and three of the four standout charities (Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition being the exception). The Facebook post prompted an insightful comment from Chris Hendrix:

That’s either a sign of GiveWell’s relative obscurity or your personal obsession with the subject. The latter seems like the more optimistic view to take so I’m going to go with it.

As for the pageviews: all the pages I have created since I started editing Wikipedia got a total of 147,917 pageviews on Wikipedia in the month of December. You can see the breakdown by pages here. If you want to see all months and all pages, use this link. You can see the corresponding data for all years at this link. The view count of 147,917 in December compares with a view count of 115,239 in November and 26,794 last December (for a December-only comparison across years, click here).

In terms of pageviews, here are some highlights:

  • My Wikipedia page on Giving Tuesday, that has been edited considerably since the version as I left it, did very well. Giving Tuesday was on Tuesday, December 2, 2014, and got a total of 20,016 views during the month. You can see the day-wise breakdown on stats.grok.se (you might want to see the JSON version since the smaller traffic in the last week of the month is not visible in the graph). The number of pageviews in the first five days was, respectively: 3058, 8048, 2207, 631, and 403. A pretty big spike and rapid decay after that. Giving Tuesday had also been getting more traffic at the end of November (here’s the breakdown by day). I had mentioned this in my November 2014 review.
  • Pages on charities that I had created got many more pageviews in December than they usually do. Some of these are included in the table below. This is part of a general trend of charities getting more views in December. You can see the data for charities for all months here. You can also do a December-only comparison for charities alone here (note that not all these pages were created by me). In addition to charities themselves, philanthropic foundations also got a lot more traffic in December, but this was mostly explained by greater attention to philanthropy in the month of December, rather than by year-on-year growth. To explore those, see here and here (note that not all these pages were created by me).

Subject wikis

General background information: My site page about the subject wikis

After a very long time, I got around to doing some edits on Groupprops, the Group Properties Wiki that I had started in December 2006 (eight years ago). I started the edits on the morning of Friday December 19 and continued through Sunday. It was a strangely relaxing experience, and reminded me of my time in graduate school, before the pressure to really work on my thesis started growing, when I would just spend long hours adding and editing and improving Groupprops. But I soon got back to other, more pressing tasks.

I had also been considering editing the other subject wikis (Market, Calculus, and a newly started wiki on machine learning) but ultimately decided these were lower on my priority list than other tasks.

As for pageviews:

  • Groupprops got 77,725 views in December. Compare with 99,940 views in November and 60,232 views last December. The year-on-year metric is most relevant, because Groupprops traffic is highly seasonal and follows the ups and downs of the academic year. The year-on-year growth rate is a little over 25%. Similar year-on-year growth was observed in October and November. This year-on-year growth appears to have been due to updates to Google’s search algorithm that happened around mid-2014, probably one of the Google Panda updates.
  • Market got 20,225 views in December, compared with 19,230 views last December and 24,592 views in November.
  • Calculus got 15,542 views in December, compared with 13,451 last December and 22,383 in November.

I’ll probably do a separate blog post on the Subject Wikis Blog reviewing annual traffic patterns, and will add a link to it from here when done.

Open borders

General background information: My site page about open borders

Open Borders: The Case had its second highest traffic month. The number of pageviews was reported as 35,318 by WordPress Jetpack Stats and as 34,374 by Google Analytics. This was thrice the corresponding number last December, and compares to about 38,000 in November. But November was an unusually high-traffic month, thanks to US President Barack Obama’s deferred action announcement.

A number of my blog posts were published on the site:

I also worked on a site redesign with John Lee on Sunday, December 21 (you can see my Open Borders Action Group post about the subject here). The redesign will hopefully be completed in January.

Between Saturday, December 20, and the end of the month, I worked on a large number of draft blog posts for Open Borders: The Case. This was my dominant activity. The posts will be completed and released over the coming months, but you can get an idea of the topics I was exploring by going through my posts in the Open Borders Action Group.

For more on what the site has been up to, see the Open Borders: The Case December 2014 in review.

Quora

General background information: My site page about Quora

I wrote only one substantive answer in December, and asked very few questions. My Quora stats indicate 19000 views of my content in the month.

Facebook

I’ve been quite active in the Open Borders Action Group (you can see my posts here) but have otherwise been quiet on Facebook.

November 2014 in review

This is my second monthly review post. Based on some reader feedback, I’ve decided to restructure the review somewhat compared to my review of October 2014.

Job

My data science/machine learning job at LiftIgniter has been taking up most of my time. The company will be launching a new website soon, and we’ve also got a very satisfied paying customer who will hopefully have a public testimonial about the company soon. More on this (hopefully) in next month’s update.

I also wrote a Quora answer somewhat related to my job in response to the question What is it like to work on machine learning problems in a business setting?

Although not directly related to my job, this answer of mine on how I’ve picked up some machine learning in the last few months despite lacking background in the subject may be relevant.

More on my job here.

Wikipedia editing

I created just one new Wikipedia page (Yeon-mi Park). Most pages I’ve created on Wikipedia haven’t been edited much, but this page has become the center of many edit wars, of which I was blissfully unaware until I looked at the page right now. The page as it stands now is significantly expanded from the version that I bequeathed.

Wikipedia pages I have created over my lifetime got a total of about 115,239 views in the month of November (you can see my pageview counts for all months here). My page on Giving Tuesday was the most popular, getting 9089 views. This page too has been edited significantly after I was done with it. Here’s the page as I left it.

Get more background on my interest in Wikipedia here.

Subject wikis

I’ve made almost zero edits to the subject wikis (with the exception of a few typo fixes). Traffic has been pretty good for them. Groupprops got a total of 99,940 pageviews. This was a 30-day month, so the dip relative to last month (104,663 pageviews) is explained partly by that, and also partly by the Thanksgiving break causing a slight dip in traffic. Year-on-year growth is 20%: the corresponding number of pageviews in November 2013 is 82,707.

Other subject wikis that got notable traffic: Market (24,953 views) and Calculus (22,383 views).

Traffic is likely to dip significantly in December due to the end-of-year holidays.

More on the subject wikis here.

Open borders

The Open Borders: The Case website had its best month. We’ve published a November 2014 in review post on the site. I urge you to read that if you’re interested.

A number of my blog posts got published in November, including some that had been in draft mode for a while. Here’s a list:

More on my involvement with open borders here.

Quora

My Quora content got about 18000 views in the month of November.

I didn’t add much new Quora content. Apart from the two job-related answers linked in the job section of this post, I wrote three more answers. You can access my answers here.

More on my involvement with Quora here.

Facebook

At my suggestion, Sebastian Nickel started the Facebook group for Libertarian Effective Altruists on November 17, 2014. By the end of the month, the group had about 100 members. I’ve been an active participant in the group.

October 2014 in review

This is the first of what I believe could become a monthly series of posts. Each post will review the past month in two different ways. First, I’ll review my own activities over the past month. Second, I’ll review the impact over the last month of stuff I have created cumulatively over my lifetime.

What I’ve been doing

The header links are to general pages on my site.

  1. Job: I’ve been busy with my full-time job as a data scientist and machine learning person at LiftIgniter. I hope to share more information publicly about my work in the next few months.
  2. Wikipedia: As you can see from my new page creation history, I didn’t create any pages on Wikipedia this month. I did, however, make a number of minor edits.
  3. Subject wikis: I haven’t added new content to any subject wikis.
  4. Open borders: I discontinued the weekly Open Borders Action Group roundups that I had been writing. The most recent one is from September 29, 2014. I also worked sporadically on some post drafts, but didn’t publish anything, and may not get around to publishing anything in the coming month either.
  5. Cognito Mentoring: It’s continued to be dormant, but I’ve been continuing to informally advise some of the former Cognito Mentoring mentees.
  6. Quora: I asked about 16 questions and wrote about 8 answers.
  7. Other social media: I created an OKCupid profile. I’ve continued to add more friends on Facebook and had many interesting discussions there.

Impact

All counts are within the month of October (2014).

  1. Job: Too early to evaluate and disclose.
  2. Wikipedia: Wikipedia pages created by me got a total of about 122,518 views in October 2014.
  3. Subject wikis: The top viewed subject wikis: Groupprops (104,663 views), Market (24,417 views), Calculus (24,757 views). The numbers are taken from Google Analytics and are available only to me.
  4. Open borders: The website got a total of 23,639 pageviews (excluding views by logged-in administrators). There will be a blog post for the site providing a more detailed update.
  5. Cognito Mentoring: info.cognitomentoring.org got 2,263 pageviews and the main site got 888 pageviews.
  6. Quora: My stats (accessible only to me) show that my questions and answers collectively got about 16,400 pageviews over the month.

Basic information