Bogleheads® Wiki 2013 annual report

"In a departure from the wiki's policy of neutrality, this content presents the personal viewpoint of Blbarnitz and LadyGeek."

May 13, 2013 marks the fifth anniversary of the launching of The Bogleheads® Wiki. The wiki was publicly announced on May 21, 2008. Over this five year span, the wiki has experienced slow, but steady expansion. Our Wiki statistics page provides us with the following numerical snapshot of our wiki project as of May 9, 2013.

The past year was marked by a substantial increase in wiki readership, as average daily views of the wiki accelerated to 10,000 views per day. The table below shows the growth of daily readership over the wiki's five year history.



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

The Year in Review
Wiki editors authored multiple articles across three major subject areas during the year:


 * An expansion of our pages devoted to investors whose home country is outside the U.S. During the past year, we created pages designed for investors living in EU countries, the UK, Japan, and Taiwan. These pages are a partial reflection of the global range of our forum's membership.
 * We expanded our series of pages devoted to applying our site's basic investment philosophies with investment companies other than Vanguard, as investors may prefer other investment firms or have investments in employer provided plans or college savings plans that utilize many different investment companies. Articles were composed,covering TIAA-CREF, T. Rowe Price, Dreyfus, Northern Funds, DFA, Blackrock iShares, as well as an additional page in our series on the Thrift Savings Plan.
 * We added two new articles to our series of pages concerning individual retirement accounts: Traditional versus Roth, and Roth IRA as an emergency fund.

A number of pages were composed honoring requests emanating from forum conversations. Such pages include:


 * Approximating total international stock market (June 23, 2012)
 * Managing a windfall (September 3, 2012)
 * Family strategic planning (December 5, 2012)
 * Callan periodic table of investment returns (January 24, 2013)
 * Using open source software for portfolio analysis (March 10, 2013)

Another thematic grouping of note is our collaboration with our sister Canadian wiki, finiki, for a pair of articles: Multifactor investing - a comprehensive tutorial, finiki, and Fama-French three-factor model analysis authored here at Bogleheads. An update to Fama and French three-factor model was also a result of this effort.

The following table highlights the more frequently viewed pages which were added to the wiki over the recently concluded year. For a complete listing of new pages, refer to "New wiki pages FY 2012" in the footer box below. New page creation is, of course, not the sole measure of wiki editing activity, since existing pages are always subject to updating and improvement. For example, many of the wiki's 529 plan articles were updated over the course of the year, as were articles affected by changes in U.S tax rates and contributions limits.

On November 18, 2012, the wiki administrators commenced on a major revision to match Wikipedia's formatting. As readers are familiar with Wikipedia (and the wiki uses the same software), a similar interface would facilitate wiki navigation.

Peculiar Investor initiated the effort on our sister Canadian wiki, finiki. In close collaboration with (and assistance by) Peculiar Investor, the wiki updates were complete on December 13, 2012.

In summary:
 * The wiki editors have a new Wiki Editor's Toolkit, which contains revised pages to assist editors with page editing, development, and maintenance.
 * The left sidebar (appears on all pages) has been revised.
 * All menus are consistent with Wikipedia format
 * We revised the Browse site article to incorporate drop-down category lists.

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.