Wow. It’s been over a year since I last did a “State of the WIST” post.  I last ran this report in June 2023; time flies when you’re having fun.

I feel like my consistency level in getting new quotes in over the last year has been … not great. My back-of-the-head goal remains 5-6 quotes posted each weekday. The reality has had a lot wider variation than I’d want. Two factors in play here:

1. I’ve been doing a lot more work at re-researching and cleaning up older, already-entered quotations. Digging up sources, reworking titles, sometimes expanding on little snippets, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, those revisions don’t show up on the front page of the blog, nor in the RSS feed or email; they do end up mirrored in the downstream systems I send these to (my Mastodon account and my Diaspora* site).
2. A lot of the work I’ve done has been during time blocks that have become increasingly crowded over the last year.

The result is that people just looking at new stuff here may see five or six quotes … or may see just one or two.

I’ll be trying to improve that over the coming months, as well as trying to make “revised” quotations more visible.

What’s happened over here since last time?

Some changes that took place on the WordPress site the past year:

• Kept things updated — WIST is currently on WordPress 6.6.1.  I usually wait a month or so after each point release, as the RSS feed program files have to be serviced manually when I do an update, and 0.x and 0.0.x can be fairly frequent after a release (though Automattic seems to be doing a better job about beta testing the past few releases).  I have not updated to using the Gutenberg stuff that the WP folk seem so insistent on; I run a pretty basic blog here, and they keep trying to turn WP into a site editor. Sigh.
• I implemented some citation (post title) variations that will help sort posts, in certain contexts, more meaningfully (e.g., someone whose output is largely from speeches will have their speeches showing up sorted by date rather than title or location).
• I tried to implement a visitor Dark Mode tool, but the one I invested the most work into had issues with some of my design. So, if it ain’t broke, I won’t try to fix it.

So not a lot there, just a fair amount of grind.

Doing the Numbers

Let’s look at the numbers:

So continued progress, despite some housecleaning — deleting duplicates, and updating old posts with better metadata, etc. — as is shown by the graph (which normalizes the time frame):

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the time frame):

Note that, as always, all of these quotations are personally curated to some degree or another — digging out citations and online links when possible, finding author photos, etc. No mass uploads for me.

I currently stand at 732 quotes flagged as meme/visual quotations. That number’s gone up from 710 last year, though slowly; I generate one of these every few weeks.

Top Authors

Of the authors I have, who are the most quoted in WIST?

As the numbers get higher, it’s harder folk to do more than shuffle around, esp. barring I find any massive new source of quotations (and time to put them in). That said, Bertrand Russell did manage to push George Bernard Shaw out of the Top Ten. A lot of the ones who went “up” in the ratings did so because I have a big tranche of quotations that I’m entering in, usually one a week.

And, yes, that’s a bunch of old, dead, white guys. Sigh.

This table is more for curiosity’s sake than any real meaning, showing not just how prolific these folk are, but how interested I am in recording things these individuals said.

Top Quotations

Here are the Top 10 Most Visited Quotations Ever (with how they’ve changed since September 2022). I find these interesting, since it’s not driven anything I do, but page hits by visitors.

1. – (13,551; was 12,036) John Kenneth Galbraith, Speech (1963-12-13), “Wealth and Poverty,” National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty
2. – (8,551; was 7,763) Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)]
3. ↑ (8,117, was 5,812) Plato Republic, Book 1, 347c
4. – (6,517, was 6,393) Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)
5. – (6,399, was 6,072) Bertand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (1933-05-10)
6. ↑ (6,340, was 5,390) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter (1907-01-01) to Clara Rilke
7. ↑ (5,531, was 4,635) Sa’adi “Bani Adam [The Children of Adam],” Gulistan [Rose Garden], ch. 1 “On the Conduct of Kings,” story 10 (1258)
8. – (5,446, was 5,226) Fran Lebowitz, “Tips for Teens,” Social Studies (1981)
9. – (5,013, was 5,013) John Steinbeck, Speech (1962-12-10), Nobel Prize acceptance, Stockholm
10. ♥  (4,860; new on list) Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (1980-01-21)

Asimov’s quote popped back onto the list; the one that bumped it off last year, from Sa’adi, has climbed the charts from 10 to 7. Plato looks to have been popular, too. In exchange, we lost a quote from William Hazlitt, alas.

The only constraint on that list is that it’s hard for a new quote (one I have just entered) to get anywhere near this list; in fact, the latest-entered quote here is the Rilke one, entered in 2015. Looking at quotes that were most popular over the last year provides a somewhat different set.  Since 7/2023, the Top 10 viewed quotes were, according to Google Analytics:

1. ↑ 1,789 Plato Republic, Book 1, 347c
2. ♥ 1,331 Emerson, Ralph Waldo — (Misattributed)
3. ♥ 1,109 Galbraith, John Kenneth — Speech (1963-12-13), “Wealth and Poverty,” National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty
4. ♥ 966 Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy [Divina Commedia], Book 1 “Inferno,” Canto 3, l. 1ff (3.1-9) (1309) [tr. Hollander/Hollander (2007)] 
5. ↓ 887 Aristotle — (Attributed)
6. ♥ 869 Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy [Divina Commedia], Book 1 “Inferno,” Canto 5, l. 121ff (5.121-123) [Francesca] (1309) [tr. James (2013), l. 141ff]
7. ↓ 834 Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics [Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια] (c. 325 BC) (paraphrase)
8. ↓ 831 Rilke, Rainer Maria —  Letter (1907-01-01) to Clara Rilke
9. ↓ 823 Sa’adi “Bani Adam [The Children of Adam],” Gulistan [Rose Garden], ch. 1 “On the Conduct of Kings,” story 10 (1258)
10. ↓ 803 Franz Kafka — Letter (1904-01-27) to Oskar Pollak [tr. Winston (1977)]

Four quotes jumped onto the leader board here. Galbraith’s quote has been here before (it not being on the list last time was actually an anomaly). The two Dante ones are a delight since they were entered into the system this year (I’m still going through the Divine Comedy, and am about a third of the way through Paradisio, which does not offer a lot in the way of quotations). I’m kind of thrilled about the Emerson quote being here; as I consider WIST to be at least in part an educational and reference work, having a lot of traffic to a post talking about how a commonly attibuted quote to Emerson is, in fact, not from him, is good to see.

Alas, still (almost entirely) it’s Old, Dead, White Guys.  Unfortunately this year, we had quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Hoffer, Homer, and Aeschylus drop from the leader board.

Surprisingly, the author pages for Franz Kafka and Cicero both showed up near the top of the stack.

Who Are You People?

As Google Analytics gets more complex, figuring out old simplistic stats becomes a bit more difficult. As far as I can tell, though compared to 7/2023, I am getting 205 visitors / day (vs 196) and 320 pages visited / day (vs 215). So a nice upward trend there. Producing content drives visitors, I would hope.

I also have 21 follow-by-email users with Follow.it (up from 11) — this despite the fact that my RSS feed was frelled for a couple of months. Thanks for sticking with me. I have 6 email subscribers through JetPack, too (waves).

Over in social media, I am still on Mastodon, having given up on the cess pit that is Twitter. Back in the Twitter days, I ostensibly had 143 followers (including an uncertain number of bots), while on Mastodon I currently have 193 followers (up from 68) — but I’m getting a lot more interaction than I was on Twitter in terms of likes and forwards, so I’m happy there.

I have 93 contacts on my Diaspora* mirror (up from 86), and I actually get some good engagement over there as well with likes and discussion.  That said, something broken in pulling images over to Diaspora* (for me), which is hampering the work I do there; hopefully, by the time the next report rolls around, it will be fixed.

An interesting things about the Internet — my home WIST.info blog gets a lot of hits — but it’s nearly all through search, rather than (as in the old days) people visiting through RSS or dropping in every few days to see what’s new.  View counts on individual posts used to be in the tens, twenties, forties; these days, on the newest front page posts it’s a whole series of zeroes. That’s in part why I continue to push out to other sites (Mastodon, Diaspora*), to get feedback on the new things I am putting out there.

Demographics:

• As far as national representation of visitors to my website, we have the US (52%, up from 49%), UK (8%), Canada (5&%), China (back down to 4%), and India (4%).
• That mirrors the language, with English (82%) and Chinese (5%) as the vast majority of users (still 2% German, which continues to tickle me).

Hardware and software:

• From a platform perspective, visits to WIST.info come Desktop 56%, Mobile 42%, and Tablet (2%).
• Browser-wise, Chrome slipped slightly from 60% down to 58%; Safari remains at 31%, Edge and Firefox both jumped a point to 6% and 5% respectively.
• That’s interesting to cross-reference with OS, where Windows is 32% of the users, iOS 24%, Mac another 21%, and Android at 20%, showing very little difference from last year.

The Year Ahead

• I’d (still) like to figure out how to drive up traffic (or, framed another way, understand if I am somehow keeping traffic away).
• Continue backfilling tags as I come across quotes that have captured my eye again.
• Maybe do some tag cleanup (there are some that are redundant — plural vs singular — and others where I’ve inadvertently concatenated terms). I poked at that a bit, and it’s a heck of a lot more difficult than it should be, so we’ll see.
• Continue making some author sweeps to normalize how some works are organized.
• Continue work on parallel translations of foreign works.

And that’s the end of the Q3 report for 2024. See you next time I get an urge to do this!