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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).
quit
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
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.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
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.
Come on! Some skepticism please. You need a lot bigger sample size than this to make any sort of statement in either direction.
Oh, and yeah, cue jokes about wikipedia's supposed lack of skepticism.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Hindsight is 20/20. Now try using this to _predict_ something correctly.
I'm seeing a very steep downward trend.
While Palin was among the least well-known of the potential GOP vice presidential picks - and therefore perhaps the candidate whose Wikipedia page was most in need of updating - her entry saw far more activity than that of Minn. Gov.
I wouldn't mind giving her entry some activity!
It reminds me of one they figured out years ago that when there's a major military move about to happen there's a spike in Dominoes orders at the White House from everyone working late.
Palin is still a ReThuglican Jew Puppet cunt!
Another 4 years of that Jew Puppet Bu$Hitler Chimpy McHaliburtin
I am sure her down syndrome kid will make a good ReThuglican. It is already smaller than Chimpy the Jew Boy.
Vote for Hope
Vote for Change
Vote for Obama.
How many people do you think googled Sarah Palin after she was announced as McCains running mate? And how many of those people looked for a Wikipedia entry?
Thats why it was edited. Cause no one knew who she was.
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.
It's somewhat interesting that there was a spike in editing for Sarah Palin's wiki, but that information is hardly predictive of McCain's decision. Regardless of what everyone thought about the kind of VP she would make, the pick itself was a genuine surprise just about everyone including Palin herself. Personally, I had my bets on Lieberman and I still think he would have been made McCain the most competitive against Obama and Biden given the Republican base consists mostly of men.
McCain: " I'll let you be the vice president if you fuck me. Hold on while I get my Viagra."
Palin: " Okay, but don't go too deep. George W. Bush gave me the same promise last time and the kid came out retarded. The bastard didn't even let me be an intern, much less vice president.
McCain: " Hold still while I hand-feed it into your butt while mah lil' blue pill kicks in."
Palin: " UNH!"
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
no wiki or gadgets required. see you there? fear is unprecedented evile's primary weapon. that, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' greed/fear/ego based hired goons' agenda. Most of yOUR dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'war', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid scheme. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & the notion of prosperity, not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one. see you on the other side of it. the lights are coming up all over now. conspiracy theorists are being vindicated. some might choose a tin umbrella to go with their hats. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be yOUR guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. there are still some choices. if they do not suit you, consider the likely results of continuing to follow the corepirate nazi hypenosys story LIEn, whereas anything of relevance is replaced almost instantly with pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking propaganda or 'celebrity' trivia 'foam'. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
http://news.google.com/?ncl=1216734813&hl=en&topic=n
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?hp
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/02/nasa.global.warming.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/05/severe.weather.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/02/honore.preparedness/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01dowd.html?em&ex=1212638400&en=744b7cebc86723e5&ei=5087%0A
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/05/senate.iraq/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/washington/17contractor.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/world/middleeast/03kurdistan.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080708/cheney_climate.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080805/pl_politico/12308;_ylt=A0wNcxTPdJhILAYAVQms0NUE
is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in. for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it? we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=weather+manipulation&btnG=Search
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster. meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html
the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are consta
campaign organizations, as a whole, are still idiots.
Too late, the elections are already decided http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I can't understand this obsession with politics. It doesn't make any difference (I's white, so I don't use the double negative before the word difference) to most people who is their 'leader' in Washington DC. I wish that they would all simply disappear. Or at least, just shut up. There are so many things that are more important and more interesting than DC politics. Political reporting of the same non-story over-and-over day-after-day is a cheap but acceptable way to avoid doing any real reporting on real stories.
Fox is the worst, of course, but they are easy to avoid. NPR radio can be really hard to take sometimes with their endless number of over-educated middle-aged white women with grating metallic voices (shit, I almost said Jewish, but I didn't, caught myself just in time. My problem is with over-educated, over-bearing, insufferable middle-aged middle-class women of all ethnicities on the radio. And yes, that includes you, Ms. Elaine Butterworth-Berkowitz-Hernandez of WGBH Bahstahn, even if you were so hot in high school in Amherst back in the 1970s And the women come and go, talking of Michelanglo...)
NPR spent MILLIONs of hours in the 1990s endlessly covering the Israeli-Palestine thing. They were under the illusion that that (note the conjuction vs. indirect pronoun transposition, grammar Nazis) was somehow important. And they completely missed the biggest story of the decade, the rise of Asia and especially Shanghai from a dumpy seaport to one of the most important cities in the world.
So what are they missing now? What's the opportunity cost of all this insufferable coverage of minor insects like Joe Biden and this Alaskan twit? What's the big story of the decade that we're not hearing about?
If you don't want to put up with listening to audio:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94118849
It's not as complete as the WP story though.
I'm going to start watching the page on Hurricane Gustav to see what buildings will get destroyed.
I wonder how well that would with the pages for foreign nations.
After reading Palin's page, it is very heavily biased against her.... Taking a lot of time/space to highlight various less than rosy portions of her Governorship. It is pretty sad, IMO, that wikipedia can't be more balanced. But obviously that is asking too much.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I, for one, think that it was the precise temperature in Alaska, or that McCain has a crush on her, as he does on Paris Hilton. My after the fact explanations are just as good as these. Correlation and Causation are now officially equal, I guess.
This may be an example of a reverse troll. By taking an extreme opposite position, it makes your position look more reasonable.
Republicans did this about 10 years ago, by pretending to be really annoying Democrats, calling people at inopportune hours, etc.
..........FULL STOP.
+1
You owe me new keyboard - thank you.
..........FULL STOP.
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.
Find free books.
I just won 500$ betting on my team by checking Wikipedia on the final results at halftime.
Looks like McCain just wrapped up the election this year. I mean, he has all of Alaska's electors in the bag!
That would be the global population reduction plan. It will be made to look like an accident and be "natural". Some bioweapon release of some kind is my best guess, but they will claim it was a natural mutation.
For some reason this kind of politically-motivated editing reminds me of the words "he who controls the past, controls the future".
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Bloggers suggested Palin months ago. But that won't show up on Wikipedia.
bork bork, mothership needs to rethink it's plans.
Without having seen this slashdot article I was researching Palin and spied he wikipedia entry. There were over 500+ edits in the last two days. I thought something was going on....to bad I've never heard of her or I might have thought of it Thursday...haha
I also saw a spike at that same time on councilman Les Winan's wikipedia's entry, but--like Sen. McCain--I figured that either Palin, Gilliam or the dead one would have much more cachet.
"Open source" is not a synonym for "public records!"
WikiCourthouse, the public filings that anybody can edit!
When I looked at the page yesterday, there were about six in-line photographs from Palin's 2007 visit to Kuwait. At that time, the article body did not mention the trip at all, so the inclusion of six photographs from the trip smacked of bias. The message that the operative who edited the page wanted to send was clear: "Palin has foreign policy experience because she visited Kuwait one time last year."
What silly games we play.
McCain and Cougar for president!
There was also a spike on InTrade (intrade.com) around that time...
Rirelobql xabjf gung EBG-13 vf gur yrnfg frpher rapelcgvba rire, ohg jbhyq lbh jnfgr lbhe gvzr npghnyyl qrpelcgvat vg???
I dunno. I don't think someone as chatty as Biden can seem cold and hard. Those two traits go along with aloofness, which he doesn't seem to have.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Racist black people can lie to pollsters
about race-related opinions.
How can one monitor wikipedia traffic in real time?
i tried:
http://stats.grok.se/
but it seems 2 months behind atleast.