Bogleheads® Wiki 2014 annual report

"In a departure from the wiki's policy of neutrality, this content presents the personal viewpoint of David Grabiner."

May 13, 2014 marks the sixth anniversary of the launching of The Bogleheads® Wiki. The wiki was publicly announced on May 21, 2008. Our Wiki statistics page provides us with the following numerical snapshot of our wiki project as of May 9, 2014. Two pages moved into the ten most viewed page list for the first time; these pages are Posting FAQ for the Bogleheads® forum ‏‎ and Backdoor Roth IRA.

The past year was marked by an increase in wiki readership, as average daily views of the wiki accelerated to over 12,700 views per day. The table below shows the growth of daily readership over the wiki's six year history. On September 20, 2013 the wiki reached a milestone of sorts, attaining its 10 millionth view.



Historical statistics and a timeline of wiki initiatives can be found in the appendix to this report.

The year in review
The addition of reader feedback allowed many people other than editors to help build the wiki. Readers can suggest additional links and clarifications, or corrections such as broken links and incorrect numbers. Clarification requests are particularly useful, because the wiki is for the benefit of all readers, and what is clear to the Wiki editors may not be clear to the general public. For example, this feedback post suggested including IRS Form 8606 in the Non-deductible Traditional IRA page, and an editor added the form to the page. As another example of an important point, this feedback post suggested a consideration of state taxes in Tax-managed fund comparison, and an editor added a note to the page.

The Bogleheads Blog, started in February 2014, includes occasional posts on This Week in the Wiki, highlighting significant developments. In the other direction, the Wiki now has pages for Madsinger monthly reports and The White Coat Investor blogs.

Several articles were added to cover common forum topics:


 * FTSE indexes and a series of articles on the individual indexes (August 6-16, 2013) were added because Vanguard now uses these indexes for its international fund
 * How to build a lazy portfolio (September 23, 2013) and Approximating Vanguard target date funds (September 24, 2013) for the benefit of investors without a good single-fund 401(k) option.
 * Record retention (November 27, 2013)
 * US mutual fund performance studies (December 19, 2013)
 * Index fund (February 28, 2014); the wiki has many pages about individual index funds, and finally added a general reference on what an index fund is.
 * Life-cycle finance (March 8, 2014)

Appendix
The table below provides a history of cumulative annual statistics for The Bogleheads&reg;  Wiki, derived during the annual May anniversary week of the wiki's founding. The spreadsheet component of the table also contains tabs showing the statistics for each year.