Wikipedia Edits Forecast Vice Presidential Picks 152
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).
Re:Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
And that edit could get picked up by tons of people and spread around, even if it's not accurate.
Subject intentionally left blank (Score:5, Insightful)
Hindsight is 20/20. Now try using this to _predict_ something correctly.
Re:What's This? (Score:2, Insightful)
What's that? It's easy to see trends from nothing leading to something after the fact..?
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pre hoc, ergo propter hoc (Score:3, Insightful)
So... people interested and informed in politics?
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The problem is of course that they want the biographies "updated" for all the press and other interested parties that are going to hit Google in the first hour after the announcement.
So much more likely will be that before such announcements, they will update like ten or twenty biographies, to mask which is the real one.
That of course if they care enough.
Re:It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:4, Insightful)
Reverse Troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's This? (Score:3, Insightful)
This story is completely meaningless.
Anyone can stand up after the fact and say "Hey! I could've predicted this!"
Re:Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
But the problem with that is some random jackass could see "Oh, so-and-so is PROBABLY going to be picked, so I'll edit it to say they were picked, since it's going to happen anyway."
Aye. Had wikipedia existed back in 1948 someone might have written [wikipedia.org] "Dewey and Warren won a sweeping victory in the presidential election yesterday. The early returns showed the Republican ticket leading Truman and Barkley pretty consistently in the western and southern states."
Re:It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reverse Troll? (Score:1, Insightful)
[CITATION NEEDED]
Re:Palin still a ReThuglican Jew Puppet c*nt (Score:2, Insightful)
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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Re:Reverse Troll? (Score:1, Insightful)
I really hope dirty tactics like these come back to bite the Republicans. The Democrats used to be the lesser of two evils, but they're just not in the same class of evil as the Republicans anymore. With the nomination of a truly revolutionary candidate, they might not be evil at all.