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Wikipedia Edits Forecast Vice Presidential Picks
JimLane writes "The Washington Post reports on the findings of Cyveillance, a company that 'normally trawls the Internet for data on behalf of clients seeking open source information in advance of a corporate acquisition, an important executive hire, or brand awareness.' Cyveillance decided 'on a lark' to test its methods by monitoring the Wikipedia biographies of Vice-Presidential prospects. The conclusion? If you'd been watching Wikipedia you might have gotten an advance tipoff of Friday's announcement that McCain was selecting Sarah Palin. 'At approximately 5 p.m. ET (Thursday), the company's analysts noticed a spike in the editing traffic to Palin's Wiki page, and that some of the same Wiki users appeared to be making changes to McCain's page.'" The article goes on to say that watching Wikipedia pages for the Democratic VP hopefuls would have tipped Obama's choice of Biden, as well. NPR also has coverage (audio).
So basically, TFS says that wikipedia edits are made to a relevant article prior to an event, and therefore, these wikipedia articles were caused by the event.
The tip-off seems to be that the same people were editing both the Presidental and (eventual) Vice-Presidential candidate pages. The same pattern was observed with Obama/Biden.
Actually, it was the Gulf War at the Pentagon with the 'za:
http://tafkac.org/politics/pentagon_pizza.html
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So much more likely will be that before such announcements, they will update like ten or twenty biographies, to mask which is the real one.
Perhaps, although personally I would prepare any edits in advance and make them at exactly the same time as any announcement (/leak or whatever)
Don't forget, people. A reverse troll is still a troll. Don't take parent seriously. Anyone who appears to, may be considered to be reverse trolling themselves. Best not to even respond.
Just one more example of wikipedia's "neutrality" NPOV policy being used to promote exactly 1 point of view, silencing all others.
As has been the point of half the comments on this story ... I don't think anyone's surprised at all.
I was one of the people who viewed (didn't edit) her page that morning, I did so, because I had heard that there was a private jet that had just landed in Dayton, OH, apparently under a great deal of secrecy, which had a fight plan from Alaska. That fact was replicated at the bottom of her wikipedia page. Otherwise the page looked like a fair, short, biography of the Governor. It even included information about her Troopergate scandal, however, it was just a short blurb. I didn't check the history page, one should always check the history page for a fast moving story.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
This whole thing is nonsensical. I did some research on this myself earlier in the day wading through hundreds of diffs.
On the democrat side:
We had a very good idea days before the official announcement it was Biden. Obamas people said their pick would be no surprise and it was common knowledge most of the other runner ups were not chosen essentially leading to Biden.
On the republican side:
There was a small edit war starting on the 28th for Palin someone kept writing it was her and other people changed it back to a less assertive statement. Other edits to Palins page said it was Tom Ridge and there were similiar edits to Tom Ridges page proclaiming he was the VP pick.
There were no similiar edits asserting VP nomination (although there were "rumor" sections) on the Liberman or Romney pages.
People noticing frequency of edits then using that as an indicator of prior knowledge is not a very convincing argument as increased interest would naturally follow increased edits as the expected announcement neared. Comments regarding Palin as a possible VP pick have been included on her page for many months.
The only *intersting* thing I took away from this is how in the last two days the conterversy sections of Palins article which survived several months suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke over the last two days?
The method of analysis is quite a bit more mundane than you seem to be implying here. Every Wikipedia page has a "history" log that shows every contributor, when the edit happen, and even what words were changed on each edit. All they did is take this page history and perform a modest analysis between each one of the VP candidates... and that was done more as a forensics review than anything when it was happening. The page history is public data, and you simply have to go to the Wikipedia article and click on the "history" tab to see the information.
As far as monitoring changes in real-time, you can do that via RSS-feeds which you can get for each page individually or for Wikipedia as a whole (although the whole Wikipedia RSS-feed is a firehose of data). Basically, you can get notified when each page gets edited or modified. Usually this is used to catch trolls, but it could be used for this sort of analysis a well.