More on using Wikipedia to predict who Romney’s VP nominee will be:
The only way that could work is to monitor all of the likely picks on an hourly basis to track their updates against one another. It’s likely that the Romney campaign will attempt to scrub Wikipedia of distasteful information on the nominee right before the announcement’s made, and we don’t know when that will be.
Still, that data is only an indicator; the best that it gets media outlets is baseless speculation that isn’t of any use to actual reporting. This is why no right-minded editor will dedicate any resources at all to the refresh-Wikipedia-all-day-and-keep-a-running-Google-Docs-spreadsheet-of-the-number-of-edits-and-who-made-them beat.
A neat alternative for an enterprising media outlet would be to have a programmer build something akin to a real-time index that automates figures about edits to profiles. Alternatively, outlets could just slap a question-mark after a speculative headline or the wretched “UNCONFIRMED” disclaimer before it, but I doubt this will happen. Maybe I’m naive.
On the flipside, if I had the privilege of working for or with Wikipedia, I’d recommend they develop a real-time index of edits made to the profiles of those thought to be up for the GOP VP nomination, since they can probably automate those updates quicker than a lot of folks and, unlike media outlets, aren’t encumbered by all the other parts of the news cycle that need attention.
Media outlets that follow this Tumblr: Is any of this inaccurate/unfair? Programmers who follow this Tumblr: Is such automation possible/easy?
2 notes
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jakke answered:
Writing something to track edits would be pretty straightforward, for sure.
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climateadaptation likes this
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andrewgraham posted this
