Bhamwiki talk:Messageboard/15th Anniversary notes
15th Anniversary notes
There has been, I am sure you have heard, a global pandemic. It is for that reason that I am addressing you from behind my desk at home. I must confess, though, that I am more comfortable doing this here, rather than racing back and forth between Cosmo's Pizza and Jim N' Nick's trying to secure us a table, or shouting over a band at Good People Brewing Co..
Good People was the 10th anniversary. That was five years ago. Hard to believe– in part because the grocery bag of books and stuff from that event is still sitting on the floor next to me. (See below for book sale information.)
At the 10th anniversary, I recounted (or at least intended to recount) some of the origin story of Bhamwiki, which I shortened to “I started thinking that Birmingham could have its own Wikipedia.” But really, what I should have said, is that Birmingham could have it’s own “Hitchhikers Guide”. Because before I was involved in editing Wikipedia, I had already been involved in editing the H2G2 project founded by Douglas Adams in 1999. I added some things about the Vulcan statue, along with a few other trivial bits from whatever I was reading at the time. Since Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger didn’t launch their online encyclopedia until 2001, it is possible that, in a certain sense, part of Bhamwiki originated before Wikipedia did.
But really, the Bhamwiki.com domain (which at the time sounded the least silly of all the ones I considered) was registered on March 14, 2006 and Bhamwiki, freshly installed on Mediawiki 1.6.6, went public for the first time as soon as the registration spread through the DNS system over the course of the next day. My partner in getting things set up posted a list of “interstate holes” as a test article, and I started writing up policies and disclaimers before he went any further (and, as I recall, he hasn’t).
After the first year, Bhamwiki had more than 2,000 articles, with not a few of them more or less filched from Wikipedia. The 2000th, by coincidence (as far as I recall anyway) was an entry I wrote about the “model” mining village of Docena, which happened to be a topic I had researched for my college thesis in 1995. That research was sort of the first time I got the idea that Birmingham history could be interesting on its own, and not just within a local context. Therefore, it is possible that, in a certain sense, part of Bhamwiki originated in the late 20th century.
After five years, Bhamwiki was nearing 8,000 articles. Darren added the 8,000th, on “Demetrius C. Newton Gardens” in March, and Lee added the 8,100th in April, an entry about the year 1795. I did not expect, in 2006, that we would have needed an entry for the year 1795 (or Demetrius C. Newton Gardens for that matter.)
At ten years, Bhamwiki had more than 11,500 articles. I noted that the figure represented a rate of 1,157 new articles per year, which is more than three new articles, and 33 page edits, on average, per day, over ten years. At the time, that gave us 46% as many entries as the Stadtwiki Karlsruhe in Baden-Württemberg, Germany; 68% as many as DavisWiki in Davis, California; and 76% as many as RocWiki in Rochester, New York.
Currently, Bhamwiki has 15,026 entries. We have gained on Stadtwiki Karlsruhe (58% of their 25,722 entries); on Davis Wiki (87% of their 17,173 entries); and on RocWiki (92% of their 16,315 entries). We have climbed ahead of some of our peers, including the ArborWiki from Ann Arbor, Michigan (13,260 entries), but we remain far behind others, such as the Salzburg Wiki from Salzburg, Austria (41,649 entries)
Our 15,000+ articles are the work of the 255 of our 536 registered user who have made an edit. Six of those (myself, Lee Seitz, Darren Griffin, Robert Matthews, Mark Taylor and Rob Burton) have made edits in the last 30 days. Again, as is usual, I made 87% of the edits myself, and I kind of like it that way. I know what’s going on, but I still get glimmers of surprise and satisfaction that others are participating, with very few instances of having to clear up trouble, and no reasons so far to call the whole “wiki” thing into question.
In 2016 I shared a silly “statistic” that judging by the 49,521 redlinked articles, that at that point, our project to document the Birmingham District was only 20% complete. We now have 81,585 "wanted" articles, meaning we have fallen back to 18% completion, and are, again, less complete than ever. Still Bhamwiki as a whole is clearly better than ever, and more useful than ever.
According to Dreamhost, Bhamwiki.com has rendered 264,085,666 pages and transferred 9.37 terabytes of data over the past 15 years. Since March 1, 2021 we’ve delivered an average of 90,935 requests for pages each day, serving 3,582 distinct hosts and transferring 39 gigabytes of data. Most of those requests come from internal links with search engines coming next. Outside of those categories, the past month has seen more referrals from Bham Now than from any other source (1,413 requests from bhamnow.com in March, vs. 172 from Reddit.com, 59 from wikipedia.org and 47 from UAB.edu)
Our “WikiFactor” for those who keep track, has increased to 62 (“Birmingham Bowl” is our 62nd most popular page, with 62,302 views)
Our own social media use peaked last Spring with Chivon’s flurry of Instagram posts, including several great video presentations, which she dubbed "Ham Nuggets". Though mostly inactive, Bhamwiki’s Twitter follower account has grown to 8,072, and we have 1,090 Instagram followers. 2,116 people follow Bhamwiki on Facebook, though we have only ‘reached’ 392 people in the past month (and how we did that without posting anything is a mystery to me). If anyone has a real interest in gaining access to those social media accounts, get in touch.
More satisfying to me than these statistics is the times that I know that Bhamwiki has been really useful. To give one example, recently our article on the history of Birmingham’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument has helped a number of historians documenting its removal as part of a regional trend.
Thanks for reading, and now, a couple of offers for you:
First, I will be sending Bhamwiki t-shirts out sometime this year to those who have made more than, say, 20 edits since Bhamwiki was founded. I’ve posted mock-ups to User:Dystopos/Bhamwiki_t-shirts. Let me know what color(s) and size(s) you need, or if you need something not shown, by email. I’ll also need a mailing address.
Second, any of the following books are available for anyone interested in exchange for a donation to Greater Birmingham Ministries. Contact me by email for more information if any of them interest you:
- Barbara Baker Roberts (1961) Early History of Calera, Alabama (paperback library discard), $5
- Kirkman O’Neal (n.d.) O’Neal Steel: Memoirs of Kirkman O’Neal (hardcover, signed by author), $5
- Charles Gaines (1972) Stay Hungry (1st edition hardcover w/ jacket), $15
- Edward S. LaMonte (1974) George B. Ward: Birmingham’s Urban Statesman (hardcover, numbered 308 of 500), $5
- Marjorie Longenecker White (1977) Downtown Birmingham: Architectural and Historical Walking Tour Guide (paperback), $5
- Carl Martin Hames (1978) Hill Ferguson: His Life and Works (hardcover, library discard) $5
- Carl V. Harris (1977) Political Power in Birmingham 1871-1921 (1st edition hardcover w/ jacket), $10
- Jimmie Lewis Franklin (1989) Back to Birmingham: Richard Arrington, Jr, and His Times (hardcover w/ jacket) $5
Virginia O. Foscue (1989) Place Names in Alabama (paperback, like new), $5- Frank Joseph Fede (1994) Italians in the Deep South (hardcover w/ jacket, former gift), $5
- Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton & Jacqueline A. Matte (1996) Seeing Historic Alabama (paperback library discard), $5
- Lynne B. Feldman (1999) A Sense of Place: Birmingham’s Black Middle-Class Community 1890-1930 (paperback, like new), $5
- T. K. Thorne (2013) Last Chance for Justice: How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers (hardcover w/ jacket, signed by author), $10