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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.
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.
Hindsight is 20/20. Now try using this to _predict_ something correctly.
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
So... people interested and informed in politics?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
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.
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
Even as a registered Republican, I think the world (mostly) of Lieberman (the only thing I dislike about him is his stance on censoring games, but then again most senators and representatives are for this) but think that his choice would've sealed the deal for Obama. Many of McCain's own constituents don't want to see a Pro-Choice ticket, and with Lieberman on the ticket they would be more likely to just stay at home on Nov. 4. It was a very smart strategic play by McCain to pick Palin for several reasons. She's not establishment, which is a stigma that I'm surprised the Obama camp hasn't tried to label McCain with more. She's a mother of 5, including a special needs child, so if Biden hammers her too hard in the VP debates it could appear to some that he's picking on a woman and therefore create an image of someone who's cold and hard. This is definitely not the image I'd want to paint if I was a Democratic candidate, since they are supposed to be the party of the common man (bullcrap IMO, I actually think the party system should be abolished, but that's just my view). She also gives McCain someone who is strong on reform issues and is a whistle blower, something that you can hardly say about Romney or Pawlenty. Personally I think it was a good choice, as all anyone was talking about yesterday was her, not Obama's speech. Stole some of his thunder. Whether it works for McCain in the end has yet to be seen, but it will be certainly interesting to watch the Biden Palin debate, whereas I think I would have just watched something else rather than Biden v. Romney or Biden v. Pawlenty. They both would've been boring choices indeed. Whatever happens, it's going to be a fairly close election, although not as close as 2000.
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!
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.
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!
If that is the strategy, I don't think that it is going to work particularly well. Sure, Sarah Palin is a woman, but that's where the resemblance to Hillary Clinton starts and ends. She's an evangelical Christian who thinks that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the classroom. She says she's not convinced that global warming is the result of human activity. She opposes abortion even in the case of incest or rape. When the environment and industry are at odds, she's squarely on the side of industry. She does have good qualities, but she actually pushes the ticket to the right in terms of values and issues. As a centrist Democrat, the chances of me voting for McCain have just gone from slim to none.
Of course, that may be intentional: McCain may be trying to shore up his support on the right. If so, then that's a bad sign. The Democrats are enthusiastic and Obama has built a powerful political machine; 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. :-)
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.