THE BOGLEHEADS WIKI

15 january 2013

THE BOGLEHEADS^SM WIKI:

A Valuable Reservoir of Investor Information

 One of the most overlooked parts of the highly successful Bogleheads^SM community is its wiki. While the Bogleheads.org forum  gets most of the attention from both members, visitors, and the press, there is an often-overlooked wealth of valuable information available at no cost on the Bogleheads^SM wiki. One visit to that part of the Bogleheads.org site is all that’s needed to convince visitors that they should probably bookmark this valuable resource for further exploration.

Background

Initially started by Boglehead Barry Barnitz in 2008, the wiki has expanded over the past few years with the addition of a dedicated group of Boglehead editors and contributors. Since wikis are always a work in progress, the information available continues to expand both in new subject matter and with additions and refinements to existing topics.

History

Ken Schwartz recorded some of the initial groundbreaking history of the wiki in his wiki page, Bogleheads wiki history.

Barry Barnitz elaborated by stating the following. “I first got the notion about incorporating a wiki into my blog page from a forum conversation in which Alex [the Bogleheads.org owner and webmaster] mentioned that a wiki was a future consideration for the forum.”

“Secondly, I posted some material on Dan Kohn’s wiki, my first experience with the medium.  I wanted a medium for writing some longer pieces than is practical for a blog, so I created a wiki (using a free public available wiki platform) and placed in on my blog.”

“I wrote three or four articles. When a forum member asked a question about money market funds, I had what I felt was an informative background article on my blogwiki. Not wanting to self- promote anything in the forum, I simply created a new blog, that I christened “The Bogleheads^SM wiki” and copied the entry.  I made the post; other forum members thought the wiki idea was interesting, so I opened “the Bogleheads^SM wiki” to anyone interested. And so it began.”

And, as they say, “The rest is history.”

Annual Reports

The wiki leaders have made several annual reports to forum members (Barry did the first one, and he handed the second one off to LadyGeek, one of the other major wiki contributors. Barry and LadyGeek teamed up to do the third annual report.)