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?

[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?

[iamwhoiamtoday]

I do want to point out that because this article is being read by thousands and thousands of people, the assorted political groups are likely to not make the same mistake again. They will most likely compensate for this in the future.

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.

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:Subject intentionally left blank

[RealGrouchy]

I predict that people will interpret the findings of this article as meaning more than they do.

- RG>

Too late

[Darkness404]

Too late, the elections are already decided http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks

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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