A massive intellectual wiki-boner

This is a navel-gazing post about an exercise in vanity searching, mainly set down as a not to myself. There: you were warned.

I did some testing using the Wikipedia stats tool to investigate how many people read my contributions.

I assume that people rarely read entire WP articles, but usually skim them. So I can’t include every article I’ve contributed. I’ve looked up daily hits for articles I’ve created:

• Illusory superiority
• Introspection illusion
• Attribute substitution
• The Halo Effect (business book)
• Mistakes were made (but not by me)

and added articles that I totally or substantially rewrote:

• Scientology in the United Kingdom
• Purification Rundown
• Downtown Medical
• Disconnection
• Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (130 hits per day)
• Clear Body, Clear Mind
• Bare-faced Messiah
• A Piece of Blue Sky
• Cognitive bias (300 hits per day)
• Illusion of control

So far, these total 1000 hits per day. There are three more articles that I’ve made substantial, but not majority, contributions to, and I think it would be difficult even to skim them without reading content that I’ve written, so I feel justified in including them:

• Confirmation bias (600 hits per day)
• Xenu (1300 hits per day)
• Psychokinesis (2200 hits per day)

These take the total over 5000 daily reads.

(Introspection gets about 750 hits per day, but I haven’t included it because my contributions to it aren’t yet substantial enough).

These stats only give  a vague estimate, because:

• Web stats are unreliable for all sorts of technical issues.
• Wikipedia content is copied onto many other sites (and media) because of its open licensing.

but over the course of a year, an appropriate ballpark figure seems to be two million reads. Naturally, these are not hits on my own opinions or research but on my neutral summaries of existing published work. That’s still pretty gratifying to say the least (hence the title of this post). The point of my involvement isn’t and shouldn’t be to get “ratings”, as shown by the fact that it’s taken years to get around to thinking about this. The articles I personally think most important in this list are the ones that get the fewest hits.