This weekend marks five years since I have made the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!: Show Details and Statistics Page (also known as the “Stats Page”) available to the general public. Although the original site was coded and the underlying database had been around for about a month, it was not ready for general public consumption. The announcement of the site was made on my personal blog on 29 July 2007 and the site had been hosted on a server at home.
Over the past five years, there have been a lot of data collected and entered into the data, new features have been added (including links back to each show’s page on NPR.org and panelist first and most recent appearances) and the site was mentioned on Peter Sagal’s blog and on his Twitter stream. The site has since been moved to the cloud and has a much easier to remember URL: wwdt.me/stats
Also, during that time, I have also personally been mentioned on the show several times, including: being the listener contestant the Not My Job segment on 2009-04-25 in which Monica Seles answered zero questions correctly, being a listener contestant on the Who’s Carl This Time? round on the 2011-04-23 show, and who can forget the whole “Mo Rocca, the World’s Worst Obstetrician Dot Net” bit?
As mentioned in other posts on this blog, I am currently working on a complete code re-work for the Stats Page to bring any of the feature requests that fans have submitted over the past five years. The new site will include panelist point breakdowns, which bluff was chosen and which bluff was correct, and where each show is recorded. Granted, a lot of that data has yet to be collected and I don’t have access to some of the oldest shows to be able to collect all of that data. Some of that will take time and others will be lost in the Ether.
Thank you everyone for their comments and suggestions for the Stats Page and for checking it out!