Eric O’Keefe

Today’s London Times has a story on Palin wikipedia developments.

Here is the best of the story from the London Times:

Wikipedia has become another important internet tool in presenting politicians to voters. Few would be surprised if a campaign worker had been given the task of putting positive spin on Mrs Palin’s entry in preparation for last week’s announcement. A tracking site estimated that the page was viewed more than 2 million times on Friday.

Since the announcement the Sarah Palin page has been edited many hundreds of times more and Wikipedia has now put in place a partial block so that only established editors can change the entry. Some of Young Trigg’s entries have been amended or toned down.

The New York Times reports on the wiki wars:

The daily page view totals for even well-known candidates are striking. For example, according to a site that tracks the traffic to Wikipedia, the John McCain article had 645,000 page views in June. That month, Barack Obama had 1.35 million page views. Henrik Abelsson, who tracks the traffic, said that on Friday there were 2.4 million page views for Gov. Palin’s Wikipedia article.

Last year, a graduate student, Virgil Griffith, created a clever Web site, Wiki- Scanner, that made it easy to detect where anonymous editors of Wikipedia were accessing the site. In the process, companies, government agencies and, yes, politicians were caught in the act of spiffing up their Wikipedia entries, even as many assumed that anonymity would make them safe. (Wikipedia, incredibly and mercilessly, keeps a record of every change made to every article.)

This entry was posted on September 1, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.