Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Wiki-Politics From an Analyst’s Perspective
Anyone who has been famous for the famous fifteen minutes knows that the biographical battles on Wikipedia can get very nasty. However, in an interesting twist Eve Fairbanks reflects in the New Republic on what a political analyst can deduce from the word-fights:
The bitterness of the fights on Obama’s page could be taken as a bad sign for the candidate. But it may actually be Hillary’s page that contains the more troubling omens. Few, if any, Hillary defenders are standing watch besides Schilling. In recent days, the vaguely deserted air of a de-gentrifying neighborhood has settled over her page, with some editors losing interest and the main excitement provided by the “slut” and “cuntbag” graffiti artists. While Obama’s political past and future provoke intense argument, when I look at Hillary’s relatively static page I am reminded of Schilling’s description of the Rudy page at the beginning of his decline.
To test the air, I undertook my own little, highly unscientific experiment. I made a professional-looking but somewhat negative edit on each of the candidate’s pages. For Hillary, I wrote a line on the hopelessness of her chances even when you count superdelegates; for Obama, I added a phrase about his loss of some white support. My Obama edit was fully scrubbed within three minutes, by an editor I’d never even seen before. My Hillary edit languished untouched for four hours until Schilling finally got around to deleting it. But, even then, he carefully preserved my skeptical text and pasted it onto the separate history-ofHillary’s-campaign page, a gesture of acceptance. It has remained there, a little wart on Hillary’s Wikipedia face, untouched, ever since.
