Jokes circulated last week in the wake of the Obama VP text message announcement that McCain's internet-challenged campaign would be releasing their news via pony express. But as speculation and eventual confirmation of his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin trickled in early Friday morning, some evidence surfaced that perhaps someone in his camp is savvier than they're getting credit for.
The whirlwind of predictions favoring Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty or former primary opponent Mitt Romney for the VP nomination came to a swift halt as a dark horse candidate who had been all but ruled off the shorter of the short list of probable nominees was announced as McCain's choice. If there's anything the media hates in an early morning breaking news story it's a dark horse. Who is this woman Sarah Palin? What about all that research and analysis we did on Pawlenty and Tom Ridge? For the American public, Palin is an even greater unknown. Politico.com reported from the scene of McCain's announcement rally what was probably a common first response:
The whirlwind of predictions favoring Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty or former primary opponent Mitt Romney for the VP nomination came to a swift halt as a dark horse candidate who had been all but ruled off the shorter of the short list of probable nominees was announced as McCain's choice. If there's anything the media hates in an early morning breaking news story it's a dark horse. Who is this woman Sarah Palin? What about all that research and analysis we did on Pawlenty and Tom Ridge? For the American public, Palin is an even greater unknown. Politico.com reported from the scene of McCain's announcement rally what was probably a common first response:
Jay Schuermann, who rode up to Dayton from Cincinnati in a bus full of Republicans, admitted that he was quickly looking up Palin on Wikipedia on his BlackBerry as she was introduced.
Now, countless words or digital ones and zeros could be expended
extolling the potential harm and benefit of gathering information from
an open source knowledge model like Wikipedia, yet it strives to make
its collectively, and occasionally subjectively edited form of fact
transparent with documentation of all edits and references recorded in
article histories. But how vigilant can we count ourselves as
information consumers to really see through the transparency? If a
lotion says it's good for our skin do we look to see if there are
pthalates in the ingredients list?
Upon typing "Sarah Palin" into a Google search today, the first result that appears (below the list of Google news links) is her entry on Wikipedia. My own 8 am class gathered around a laptop to read about her moose hunting and ice fishing habits on Wikipedia as soon as the story broke. But her wiki entry not only became a go to source of information after the announcement, it played an interesting role in that announcement as it came out in mainstream media. After Romney and Pawlenty had been ruled out and rumors of a chartered Gulfstream jet arriving in Dayton, Ohio from Alaska the night before set the Palin speculation afire, the media reported that her Wikipedia entry had been revised to list her as the vice presidential nominee until editors had pulled the revision shortly thereafter. The personal blog of business writer, Dr. Paul Kedrosky, shows screen shots of the article history revisions:
Whether this was an intentional leak by the campaign or a lucky guess by a random contributor there's no way to know at this time. In either case it forged a new function for Wikipedia as an especially problematic news source. Major media outlets reported this revision on the Wikipedia page, albeit with some qualification, but this was a source and a story. This goes beyond the amateur citizen journalism posited by Shirky. Unlike a blog, Wikipedia is a collective, largely anonymous effort without even the marginal attribution of blog writer and blog commenter. In this particular instance, the information reported as fact did turn out to be fact, but as the plot thickens, the role of a model like Wikipedia in the information age becomes even more controversial yet.
As reported in an article in the Washington Post, Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry saw uncannily high numbers of revisions submitted in the hours before the announcement of her candidacy. The article focuses more on the tracking of Wikipedia edits as a way to predict stories like this one, citing the similar heavy editing and accuracy checks performed on Joe Biden and Barack Obama's pages in recent weeks.
But a story on NPR seems to challenge the revisions made by a single user known as "YoungTrig" as enhancing the substance of Sarah Palin's biography. Changes made seem to create a more flattering picture of the barely known politician, downplaying her ongoing corruption investigation and beauty queen connections, while adding glowing quotes and intimate details of her daily life. The same user simultaneously made changes to the McCain entry, raising questions as to whether the McCain campaign could be responsible for scrubbing their profiles on Wikipedia. In the NPR piece, Wikipedia editor Justin Deal cautions, "you should not edit an article if you potentially have a conflict of interest." Notice the "should" and "potentially". The nature of Wikipedia, and perhaps the web, precludes hard and fast rules, though certain entries, particularly politically charged ones like George W. Bush, have been blocked for revisions by all users except high-level editors.
So Wikipedia is encyclopedic ... up to a point. Or it is a collective forum ... up to a point. The fluidity of information, and especially information in the news in the new media necessitates and contributes to higher levels of transparency and vigilance than ever. At present writing, the Sarah Palin Wikipedia entry mentions nothing about the role of Wikipedia and the mystery of the mass revisions in its pages at all. Maybe I'll go correct that right now. Unless of course my access has been cut off.
Upon typing "Sarah Palin" into a Google search today, the first result that appears (below the list of Google news links) is her entry on Wikipedia. My own 8 am class gathered around a laptop to read about her moose hunting and ice fishing habits on Wikipedia as soon as the story broke. But her wiki entry not only became a go to source of information after the announcement, it played an interesting role in that announcement as it came out in mainstream media. After Romney and Pawlenty had been ruled out and rumors of a chartered Gulfstream jet arriving in Dayton, Ohio from Alaska the night before set the Palin speculation afire, the media reported that her Wikipedia entry had been revised to list her as the vice presidential nominee until editors had pulled the revision shortly thereafter. The personal blog of business writer, Dr. Paul Kedrosky, shows screen shots of the article history revisions:
Whether this was an intentional leak by the campaign or a lucky guess by a random contributor there's no way to know at this time. In either case it forged a new function for Wikipedia as an especially problematic news source. Major media outlets reported this revision on the Wikipedia page, albeit with some qualification, but this was a source and a story. This goes beyond the amateur citizen journalism posited by Shirky. Unlike a blog, Wikipedia is a collective, largely anonymous effort without even the marginal attribution of blog writer and blog commenter. In this particular instance, the information reported as fact did turn out to be fact, but as the plot thickens, the role of a model like Wikipedia in the information age becomes even more controversial yet.
As reported in an article in the Washington Post, Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry saw uncannily high numbers of revisions submitted in the hours before the announcement of her candidacy. The article focuses more on the tracking of Wikipedia edits as a way to predict stories like this one, citing the similar heavy editing and accuracy checks performed on Joe Biden and Barack Obama's pages in recent weeks.
But a story on NPR seems to challenge the revisions made by a single user known as "YoungTrig" as enhancing the substance of Sarah Palin's biography. Changes made seem to create a more flattering picture of the barely known politician, downplaying her ongoing corruption investigation and beauty queen connections, while adding glowing quotes and intimate details of her daily life. The same user simultaneously made changes to the McCain entry, raising questions as to whether the McCain campaign could be responsible for scrubbing their profiles on Wikipedia. In the NPR piece, Wikipedia editor Justin Deal cautions, "you should not edit an article if you potentially have a conflict of interest." Notice the "should" and "potentially". The nature of Wikipedia, and perhaps the web, precludes hard and fast rules, though certain entries, particularly politically charged ones like George W. Bush, have been blocked for revisions by all users except high-level editors.
So Wikipedia is encyclopedic ... up to a point. Or it is a collective forum ... up to a point. The fluidity of information, and especially information in the news in the new media necessitates and contributes to higher levels of transparency and vigilance than ever. At present writing, the Sarah Palin Wikipedia entry mentions nothing about the role of Wikipedia and the mystery of the mass revisions in its pages at all. Maybe I'll go correct that right now. Unless of course my access has been cut off.
By Richard Duchon
September 1, 2008 1:42 PM
Megan, this is fascinating stuff. I am certainly one among the droves of curious lemmings that flocked to Wikipedia to find out more about Sarah Palin in the minutes after news broke that she was McCain's VP choice. I went looking for what I would consider hard and fast, indisputable details about her record and experience. How long had she been governor of Alaska? What offices did she hold before that? In a lapse of journalistic scrutiny, it didn't occur to me that I should be skeptical of the marginal details in Palin's wiki entry. In this case, even those seemed relatively reliable. She was in beauty pageants. She has five kids, etc. However, as you, NPR, and the Washington Post point out, what is not in the wiki post, who made the edits and when they were made are equally as important details as what is there.
After reading your post, it seems to me Wikipedia might be well served by some kind of reliability rating, not dissimilar from those on auction sites like ebay, that would provide greater transparency. I imagine it would be simple to have a box on each site that charts the chronology of the posting, so users could see for themselves if there were spikes in edits that they ought to be suspicious of. It would add transparency to know how many unique users edited a page, how many other pages said editors have had their paws on, and even what those pages are. None of this seems out of the realm of possibility. Even a crude rating system would serve as a constant reminder to readers that they should consider every piece of information worth questioning.
This whole business of Wikipedia also reminded me of something we read in Elements of Journalism. Stories are living breathing things that grow and change. Each story is it's own little ecosystem made up of broadcast, print, online pieces and word of mouth. Kovach and Rosenstiel write somewhere in their book, that often the first edition of a breaking story includes pretty basic facts, and follow-up stories provide more substantial context. It's that first story in some cases, which has more weight than the rest to follow, because it frames the following stories. The point, of course, is whomever controls access to those early available facts gets to frame the story. Unfortunately, the journalist who has peaked at Palin's wikipedia page before diving into the phone calls to friends, family and former co-workers, has unconscious boundaries immediately erected that will limit what the reporter will ask, and subsequently what we can know.
By David Cohen
September 1, 2008 11:55 PM
That's a fantastic point. I'd been hearing the story about the Wikipedia article, thinking it was grassroots-level spin, but as you say if you've got dozens of hurried reporters finding out who Sarah Palin is from Wikipedia on their Blackberries, a well-timed bit of gloss could have an impact long after it's been caught and deleted. Well, it should be a caution to us all. Worth remembering, though, that Wikipedia keeps every version of a page ever shown available---perhaps we ought to get in the habit of checking out people who spring into the limelight on the Wikipedia of a month ago?