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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).
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.
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.
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
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".
Anything and Everything about the Net
I think you're missing the implication of the article. The implication that I got was that people who already knew who the VP candidate would be were tasked with updating the article so that when the masses looked up her page, the information would be more accurate (or more appealing to potential voters).
This strategy makes very good sense for the candidates, and so monitoring those pages seems like a quite natural predictor a few hours before an announcement is made.
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.
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.
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?
Your mom revealing that she really didn't mean to bring such an angry child into the world.
Or a really big pot party.
http://perotcharts.com/category/challenges-charts/page/14
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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
Wow, this is astounding.
I've been so engulfed by Jewish culture here in Pikesville MD, and have been part of it for so ling that I sometimes forget that this sort of bigotry is actually still out there.I'm equally astounded that someone even considers a persons religious background as more than a biographical note when forming an opinion of them.
I'm starting to remember why I don't bother with that outside world much.
Anyway, the article doesn't really explain the mechanics of how this analysis works. Do they just run a program to fetch the page every n seconds, use a reg exp to find the area where the number of edits are, get the counter and repeat for some number of hours?
I guess that this is possible but it seems a bit crude. Anyone know a more sophisticated method? err ... does anyone know a more sophisticated legal method?
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.
Just so you know.... this kind of talk actually hurts your cause... or did you really think someone would read your comment and say "oh wow, she really is a jew puppet cunt; I'm going to vote for Obama now!" ?.
Download free e-books, lectures, and tutorials at bookgoldmine.com
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.
I looked up Sarah Palin on Wikipedia a week ago as I was researching VP potentials. I didn't make an edit, because I didn't see anything in error. But she was a known potential (although a long shot), and it's reasonable to think that traffic would surge as we got closer to McCain's announcement.
And if traffic spikes, edits will naturally spike also.
YHBT. HAND.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
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.
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.
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.
Looks like McCain just wrapped up the election this year. I mean, he has all of Alaska's electors in the bag!
Not saying this is the case, as I don't live in Alaska and don't care, but if she's a lousy governor than it would make perfect sense for her Wikipedia page to focus on things she screwed up.
Honestly, if she is/was a good governor, then edit the page to reflect that, don't just bitch that the page is "unbalanced" because it doesn't spend an equal amount of words on her good points and bad points.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
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."
I've been so engulfed by Jewish culture here in Pikesville MD, and have been part of it for so ling that I sometimes forget that this sort of bigotry is actually still out there.I'm equally astounded that someone even considers a persons religious background as more than a biographical note when forming an opinion of them.
I'm starting to remember why I don't bother with that outside world much.
I'm originally from Maryland, you need to get outside a little more. You'll see it as soon as you get out of the bubble your in.
As far as how they do it, really just from how traffic analysis works. Take a database scan of page accesses at one time, then scan them at certain intervals and count the differences.
It's perfectly legal... outside of Maryland. If you sneeze in the wrong accent your hounded by the troops there.
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More than likely he's an agent provocateur from the other side. /.
Stranger things have been seen on
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
[quote]
On the DNC's website, the entire period from 1848 to the end of the 19th century is conveniently missing. Perhaps they'd like to sanitize the fact that they were the Party of Slavery, secession, Jim Crow, lynching, Segregation, KKK terrorism, and opposition to 100 years of Republican civil rights legislation . . . but we do not forget.
[/quote]
Yes, it's true. American "democrats" (who are not really "democratic") conveniently rewrite history to make themselves look like the good guys.
Completely forgetting that Abe Lincoln was a Republican and the southern Democrats were all pro slavery once...
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Bloggers suggested Palin months ago. But that won't show up on Wikipedia.
A bunch of people in the "internet community" pushed to have the "Snakes On A Plane" made too since it would be better than everything else!
We all saw just how god-awful that went.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Which is likely why it was anonymous, as it's real intent was to damage the person it supposedly was promoting. In the political scene it has often proven advantageous to smear the person running for election based upon the fringe elements of their supporters and where that proves insufficient actually using agents provocateur. Pointless on slashdot as it was bound to get -1 troll.
From a foreigners point of view it seems rather, well, bizarre to focus to much attention on who the running mate is, what, do Americans hope the person running for president drops dead so that the vice president will take over before the person they are actually voting for can do too much damage (of course at McCains age that is not all that unlikely)?
The corporate mass media PR blitz I am sure is going to be huge and endlessly repetitive with it focus of the beauty pageant winning, sports woman running mate (they will pretend that McCain does not exist) but, it is interesting in that in affect it will be the exact opposite of the previous republican duo. Vote for the president but it is actually the vice president and his horde of lobbyists who are running the country and, now it will be vote the pretty running mate but it will be the president and his horde of lobbyists who will actually be running the country ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Personally I think the Dems were the better party up until after JFK. (And after the whole slavery thing.)
Lyndon Johnson created the big government programs and turned them into the welfare party.
bork bork, mothership needs to rethink it's plans.
this kind of talk actually hurts your cause
One possibility is that is someone deliberately playing troll and mixing random offensive stuff, or it was obviously a racist Republican. Republicans routinely hurt their own cause with racist comments.... those evil Democrats make Republicas "unfairly" lose votes whigning about Republican comments.... so that would be a clumsy attempt at "turnabout is fair play" trying to make Democrats lose votes by pretending to be a Democrat making racist comments.... so that those stupid Democrats would whigne about it and vote Republican.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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!
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.
Completely forgetting that Abe Lincoln was a Republican and the southern Democrats were all pro slavery once...
And the Republican party completely forgets, even though it's within living memory, where those southern Democrats ended up.
The Democrats used to be racist. They rejected that, and half the damn party left...for the Republicans. You still have currently elected officials who left the Democratic party for the Republicans because the Democrats stopped the racism.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yeah. It was originally a Republican president that freed the slaves and Democrats controlling the South and passing and defending racist laws. It's funny how the two parties can so completely reverse on things in a half century. Now nearly all blacks and an overwhelming majority of Jews and Asians and others are welcome in the Democratic party. And so the racist asshats have fled-from and are terrified-by the minority-loaded Democratic party. They fled to, and now infest, the Republican party.
It's kinda sad really. I see many Republicans trying to court the black vote today, certainly many good non-racist Republicans trying to do good work and improve things, but the party is largely trapped by decades of the Southern Strategy pandering to and exploiting the white racist vote. Blacks are not prepared to switch over to The Racist Party, even when they more closely agree with many Republican positions. And with Republicans losing nearly 100% of the black vote, and losing most other groups by large margins, they would have no chance of reaching 50% of the general vote to win any elections if they were to publicly to condemn and alienate the racists in the party.
Hell, look at McCain for a perfect example. There was a racism-related flap over the Confederate flag. McCain said he considers the Confederate flag "offensive" and a "symbol of slavery", but answering a question during the 2000 primary he instead called it "a symbol of heritage", which he later admitted was lying because "I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles." Non racist Republicans are forced to pander to (or at least tolerate) racists in order to win nomination, and in the general election non-racist Republicans need the racist vote to break 50% and win. As I said, they have the black and other minority votes going against them. If good non-racist Republicans were to alienate the racist asshats they'd be sunk.
They can't win over the minority vote that might be otherwise be inclined to the Republican platform until they boot out the racists, and they can't afford to boot out the fucking racists until they can win more of the minority vote. Catch-22.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.