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).

Comments

What's This?

[iamwhoiamtoday]

Politicians (or their group) editing wiki pages in order to appear better to the public? (the same people who have the power to put them in office) Gasp. Shocked I am. I honestly am starting to expect this kind of thing. PS: I do think that it's rather interesting, looking for spikes in Wiki traffic to predict assorted events, perhaps we should start monitoring the "US invades the entire middle east" page

Re:What's This?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks

Re:What's This?

[Z00L00K]

So if an event is expected it may pay off to monitor the Wikipedia traffic to the related pages and by that forgo the official announcement.

This poses some interesting prospects. Like if it was possible for party A to beforehand predict that a certain alternative was going to be selected by party B and therefore making that selection problematic.

Only way around this is of course to make sure that the inner circle doesn't use the web for a while before official announcements are done.

And this does of not only apply to politics but also to a lot of other events. Like potential inside affairs when it comes to buying/selling on the stock market. Pattern analysis evolves, and it may not even be necessary to actually listen in to a certain message, just measure the amount of traffic to a certain node to make a statistically based deduction. So even if you encrypt your information it may be traced and therefore provide valuable information.

At least we do live in interesting times!

Re:What's This?

[Z34107]

It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks

Except that they used to literally analyze traffic - if you see a lot of cars in a parking lot overnight, it means people are working late hours and that, presumably, something is happening. If you see triple the usual amount of cars parked outside the Department of Defense, it may be something to phone home about.

Leaks to Wikipedia

[Apple Acolyte]

It's pretty cool that Wikipedia has become a de-facto official source of leaks for such information. Fox News was reporting that Palin had moved to the top of the list but had no confirmation of her selection about an hour before officials confirmed it, and at that time they reported that Wikipedia listed her as the pick. Someone within the campaign evidently leaked it to Wikipedia before leaking it to offline media.

IP addresses for Biden's office and Alaska's gov.

[Anonymous Coward]

156.33.15.0 - 156.33-15.255 146.63.0.0 - 146.63.255.255 if you want to check. Wikiscanner is a year out of date, so don't bother with it, though.

why I don't believe in conspiracy

[fermion]

When working at various companies, I always monitored the stock price. Invariably, the few days prior to major announcement the stock volumes would go crazy.

Invariably someone will slip up and do something to give the game away and such traffic analysis will give the game away. All that is required is that someone look.

This is especially true for government conspiracy. For the most part, too many people have to be involved, and too many people are looking.

Re:Let me ask a question

[nickswitzer]

The only way to combat the editing (no one was going to google her before the announcement) would be to have people compile the information they want ahead of time, and then when the announcement is made, do a quick update on wikipedia.org. This would have completed what they wanted and also not provided a bread trail for these people to use for their "prediction".

Cyveillance are slimy

[Bert64]

I get lots of hits from cyveillance addresses to my web servers, and the hits from the cyveilance robot are masquerading as IE users, and they don't even bother to try and retrieve robots.txt...

If you contact them about it they will offer to remove your address range from the spider, but this is also a lie, after contacting them and supplying address ranges for them to stop spidering they simply started spidering from a different source address, this time the whois record for the ipblock shows nothing unless you directly query cogent's whois server which again reveals the ranges are registered to cyveillance. This looks like a very poor attempt to hide their actions. Their spider also has a very recognizable pattern, so it would be easy to pick up anyway.

When i attempted to contact them again, they simply ignored all of my mails.
Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.

Re:Cyveillance are slimy

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.

Bullshit. If the web were to work that way, it would kill it.
You don't want them spidering your public website, then don't make it public.

If I were you, I would fuck with them. Pollute their data. You've obviously been able to figure out which accesses are there's - use that knowledge to feed them disinformation. If you are lucky, you might even able to manipulate their clients in a way that can end indirectly making you money.

prediction markets; race and polls

[bcrowell]

They say prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Yahoo has a "political dashboard" (flash app) that tries various things to predict the outcome of the presidential race. One technique they use is prediction markets, which are sort of similar to this thing about the wikipedia edits: instead of asking people their opinions, you watch their actions. In the yahoo dashboard app, you can click to switch between a map based on opinion polls and one based on prediction markets. One interesting thing is that the polls show Ohio leaning to McCain, but the prediction markets show it going to Obama. One thing that's really tough about predicting this election is that historically, racist white people have often lied to pollsters about their race-related opinions. Even though Obama is ahead in the polls, I'm kind of expecting that McCain will win, simply because the polls are likely to have this systematic error in them. OTOH, some people say that this racism-hiding effect in polls is no longer as strong as it used to be. The February Scientific American had an article that treated prediction markets with skepticism. Some of the evidence that people have been quoting in favor of prediction markets is apparently bogus, and nobody has the faintest clue how they really work.

Re:prediction markets; race and polls

[4D6963]

The February Scientific American had an article that treated prediction markets with skepticism. Some of the evidence that people have been quoting in favor of prediction markets is apparently bogus, and nobody has the faintest clue how they really work.

Well the basic idea behind the Iowa Electronic Markets is that people, anyone, can bet money (a limited amount) on who they think will win an election. Basically, polls ask people who they want to vote for, but arguably you'd have a better idea of the outcome of an election if you ask people not who they want to vote for but who they think will win. It's called the wisdom of crowds. Show a certain amount of people a jar full of pickles and they'll tell you about how many pickles are in, the more people you ask the more precise the results get (if I'm not mistaken under ideal conditions with a lack of a bias in their judgment 100 times more people should get it 10 times more precisely, that's like coherent averaging).

That's the idea behind the IEM. With a twist, instead of just asking people who they think is gonna win, they make them bet on it, as becoming more interested in it makes them be more serious about it. And in case you're wondering, Obama is so winning!

Re:It's interesting, but not predictive.

[ricegf]

that McCain is still trying to figure out how to generate enthusiasm this late in the game is not a good sign.

Perhaps, although his campaign raised $4 million over the Internet in the 24 hours after the announcement. Their previous single-day fund-raising record was under a million. So at least he seems to have figured it out. :-)

Re:Reverse Troll?

[Alsee]

>Republicans did this about 10 years ago, by pretending to be really annoying Democrats, calling people at inopportune hours, etc.

[CITATION NEEDED]

Searching republican "false flag" robocalls brings up hundreds of good hits on it.
Here's the first hit describing a series of MORE THAN 20 harrassing calls, pretending to be from the Democratic candidate. The Republicans act like jackasses making harrassing robocalls, trying to trick people into thinking the Democrat is the evil jackass, so that people will get annoyed and vote Republican.

Republicans have done it countless times across the country. Here's the Slashot story on it. It cites it happening in 53 Congressional districts in 2006. So these false flag tactics are a common Republican ploy. The only problem with the original post is that it said "Republicans did this about 10 years ago". Republicans still do it. I hardly expect them to stop just for the 2008 election.

If you, or anyone you know, gets annoying robocalls "from Democrats", they are likely from Republicans. They also like to run bogus phone "polls". They will ask wildly biased questions like "Candidate X voted against a law to protect children from pedophiles, does this make you more or less likely to vote for candidate X?" Where of course candidate "X" is the democratic candidate. By inserting "facts" about their opponent into "questions", they make it sound like innocent neutral information from an innocent neutral source, to hide the fact that they are actually wildly biased and distorted accusations being flung by a Republican smear campaign.

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