Welcome to closedsrc.org, a blog containing random postings and ramblings.

Plans for Wait Wait Statistics Site

Posted: October 18th, 2010 | Author: | 21 Comments »

A bit over three years ago, I published the initial version of the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Statistics site. Since the site went live, I have made some changes and bug fixes over the years, but the general functionality hasn’t really changed. Another Wait Wait fan has taken some of the published statistics and ran and posted some analysis.

In the post, the fan mentioned the lack of any notes on which panelist had the correct bluff and which one bluffed well enough to fool the listener, as well as displaying the points breakdown for the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round. I have some good news and some bad news: I have collected a good number of which panelist had the correct bluff, but not for all shows nor do have I collected which panelist’s bluff was chosen. I also have the points breakdown for the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round for most of the shows, but not all of them.

I have been pondering a complete re-work of the statistics site for a while, including using some well-known frameworks (including: Django and CodeIgniter) to reduce the amount of writing and tweaking code, functions and/or stored procedures. Right now, it the site contains the index page with a boat-load of PHP markup, two other includes, and another script that handles the manual generation of the panelist score graphs. All of the data entry is manually done with a GUI database access tool (SQL Manager Lite for MySQL), which has been working; but, it is just not optimal or user friendly (the tables are dang close to 3NF, or third normal form).

I would love to incorporate the displaying of the requested items, so long as I have collected the necessary data, but it will have to wait until I can start designing and building the next version of the site. Another project that I have been considering is a private administrative interface, something that is more user friendly and graphical.

Please note that all of the maintenance of the site is done during my spare time (which hasn’t been a whole lot) and is done without any direct or indirect support (financial or otherwise), association or affiliation from NPR, Chicago Public Radio or Urgent Haircut Productions. I have been lucky enough to have the site mentioned by Peter Sagal on his blog and on Twitter. If you really like the site and find it useful, you can help support the maintenance and hosting of the site by purchasing something through Amazon with this link or by clicking on the “Amazon Wish Lists” link on the right.

Filed under: Blog Post | Tags: , ,

21 Comments on “Plans for Wait Wait Statistics Site”

  1. 1 Frank Thompson said at 08:29 on April 26th, 2011:

    Hi. You appear to be missing (N/A) the 1999 and 2000 guests. I have a list of those
    guests if you need them. Let me know.

    Frank
    Ruidoso, New Mexico

  2. 2 Abe Froeman said at 09:36 on April 26th, 2011:

    I have a suggestion – I would love to see stats breaking down guests by category in the NMJ contest. So music, writers, etc.

    BTW, love the fact that you put this together.

  3. 3 Jason said at 13:07 on April 26th, 2011:

    I just head you on this weeks “wait wait” and had to check your site because I find myself asking all kinds of questions about previous shows. One question I had when I checked your site and couldn’t find is this … what is the distribution of winning scores? By that I mean if I am listening to lightning fill in the blank, and the first panelist gets 16 points total is that likely to be a winning score – or is it way below the average winning score?

    I love your page and commend you on your dedication!

  4. 4 Jason said at 13:08 on April 26th, 2011:

    Oh – and congratulations on a perfect game !

  5. 5 Linh Pham said at 13:59 on April 26th, 2011:

    I have collected a good number of guests for that time period, but haven’t had a chance to add them to the database yet. I’ll let you know if I have any missing data. Thanks!

  6. 6 Linh Pham said at 14:03 on April 26th, 2011:

    I should be able to create a query for that and add it to the page. I can’t guarantee how quickly I can get it done, but it will be on my to-do list. Thanks for the suggestion!

  7. 7 Linh Pham said at 14:06 on April 26th, 2011:

    I like the idea, though it will require a fair amount of data collection and updates. It will probably be part of a future version of the site. Thanks for the suggestion!

  8. 8 John said at 22:03 on April 27th, 2011:

    How about this for something that’s hard to track – are you hip to the fact that Karl makes the occasional scorekeeping error? Like two weeks ago, Luke Burbank actually tied for first but failed to get credit for one of his correct answers (by the “dings” that identify correct responses) during LFITB. This can be glossed over by the fact that he’s called the Judge and Scorekeeper implying that his judgment overruled whoever is responsible for ringing the bell, but there have been other occurances with different circumstances.

  9. 9 Linh Pham said at 12:36 on April 28th, 2011:

    The maintainer of the other WWDTM stats database has collected some of that information. I usually try to pay attention to the number of dings and total scores, but not enough to catch the missed or incorrect dings.

  10. 10 Ron Manor said at 13:34 on April 28th, 2011:

    I’m another one who didn’t know about your website until your appearance on the show. Congrats on a perfect score, and thanks for the work you’ve done.

    Last year I downloaded all the shows back through 2000 and comverted them to MP3, but the 1998-99 shows aren’t on the WWDTM website. Do you know anywhere I might find the audio from the first two years?

  11. 11 Linh Pham said at 14:34 on April 28th, 2011:

    Thanks, and there’s a lot of more work to be done ;)

    I actually asked one of the producers about the older shows, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on having it released in the same manner as the more recent shows. My guess is that they will have to pull the tapes (if still available) and stream and encode them as MP3s.

  12. 12 Brett said at 17:14 on May 1st, 2011:

    Hey Linh,
    I was at the Baltimore recording when you called in, and I also enjoy the sight. Two suggestions for the sight. 1) Can you create a spot for each episode summary that lists the recording location (when not in Chicago)? 2) Can you create a single graph at the top so we can easily point out the “all-time point winner” or another for “all-time game winner”. Although this may create too much competition between the panelists… (caution Paula and Mo!). Anyways, congratulations on the win and I am looking forward to seeing more.

  13. 13 Linh Pham said at 20:28 on May 1st, 2011:

    I received a list of shows that were recorded outside of Chicago from another WWDTM fan and will try to find a way to incorporate that into the page. I will see what can do with the all-time point/game winner. Thanks :)

  14. 14 L. Caution said at 15:07 on May 12th, 2011:

    Just discovered your site after listening to the May 23 show and was thrilled to discover that somebody – and it turns out several people – have been collecting stats.

    However, of course, I have a suggestion – that in any redesign, you consider updating at least some of the stats of the Wait, Wait Fan site which don’t seem to have been updated for some time (anywhere from 2005-2010). In particular, I have wondered about what seems to me to be the preponderance of 2 men/1 woman panels vs. 2 women/1 man panels. It doesn’t seem to be as bad as I thought but is still not good.

    Also, my sense is that the easiest way for a listener to lose is to be represented on the Not My Job segment – but I can’t quite tease out from any of the pages if this is true.

    Whether or not you continue, thank you for all the work you have done.

  15. 15 Linh Pham said at 10:13 on May 13th, 2011:

    I am working on filling out the earlier years of the show, but I haven’t had a lot of time in the past months. I am trying to set aside 1-2 hours a week to flesh out the data on the older shows. Once that is done, I will work on getting at least the location information incorporated and get a couple more graphs added. Thanks.

  16. 16 VI said at 06:47 on June 19th, 2011:

    I would like to see a CSV link for the Panelist Stats so we can mine the data. I’m sure you already have a spreadsheet with all of the numbers for each of the panelists, so it should be pretty straightforward to just save it as a CSV and make it available. Just a thought.

  17. 17 Linh Pham said at 07:53 on June 20th, 2011:

    All of the data that I have is stored in a MySQL database, rather than in spreadsheets. The site pulls data from the database for each request.

    At this point, I haven’t decided whether or not I will make the Wait Wait Stats database available to everyone or to those that explicitly request it. The main reason is that I haven’t decided what license I would use to release the data under.

  18. 18 Robert Neuhaus said at 12:34 on November 21st, 2011:

    Hi Linh. About May 30, 1998: Along with Peter and Carl, the panel was Margo Kaufman, Charlie Pierce and Roxanne Roberts. The NMJ guest was Joe Palca. The Chicago archive for that show is damaged and that’s all the information we could get out of it but I will verify that it is correct. As you probably noticed, the information for that show on the NPR web site is incorrect, containing the data for the previous week. Thank you for keeping all this information up to date.

  19. 19 Linh Pham said at 08:31 on November 22nd, 2011:

    I have updated the show details for May 30, 1998 and can easily change it at any time. Thanks!

  20. 20 ScottHW said at 13:29 on November 30th, 2011:

    I really like your website. I’m something of a data nerd myself.

    I am disappointed that the WWDTM podcast stream only links to the 10 most recent episodes
    http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=35

    All episodes are still available on the show’s website, but can’t be easily downloaded as the complete show (they’re divided into sections). The complete show mp3 files are still available from the NPR web archive, so clearly they don’t have any problem with people having the shows, but you need to know the link to be able to get the files. I do NOT understand the scheme the NPR’s tech guys are using to create the links / file names. It’s not Unix time, but I don’t know what the heck it is.

    I found you can cheat with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to get some more of the links
    http://wayback.archive.org/web/20060715000000*/http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=35

    But there are still a lot missing.

    Perhaps you could consider keeping the links on your site? In case anyone else is looking?

    Thanks for your interesting (and somewhat obsessive) work!

  21. 21 Linh Pham said at 14:42 on November 30th, 2011:

    You may want to check out CastRoller, as they tend to have links to older podcast entries for WWDTM: http://castroller.com/Podcasts/NprWaitWait

    As far as NPR’s naming is concerned, the only thing that I have figured out is that the program ID is 35 :)

Leave a Reply

    •