How guerilla constituents are fighting for the 2012 presidential election
It started innocently enough, with frequent edits of President John McCain’s Wikipedia entry. A typical day on the user-driven encyclopedia sees controversial subjects modified several hundred times a day, as various political viewpoints struggle for permanence. It has become commonplace for a handful of highly disputed entries, with simultaneous editing causing the occasional formatting error. This has grown more prevalent since early 2010, which saw the rise of wiki-sniping programs that monitored specific pages, automatically reverting changes to key passages. While Wikipedia’s core staff were able to remove the majority of automated editing, time proved that little can be done for the droves of actual humans who alter pages towards one view or another. Measures such as semi-protection, or only allowing an article to be edited by registered users, have slightly diminished in effectiveness as image recognition software pushes beyond the limits of ‘human test’ images.
When differing viewpoints become sufficiently polarized as to reach critical mass, entirely new sites are born from the pressure. Some aim for complete factual accuracy, such as Scholarpedia, while others address Wikipedia’s alleged liberal bias, such as the oft-criticized Conservapedia. With the presidential election of 2012 only months away, politically motivated editing is at an all-time high, rocking the foundations of open information.
During his two terms as president, George Walker Bush consistently had the most frequently edited page on Wikipedia. Some touted it as the failure of open information, praising traditional media outlets who all usually had the same story. Others used it to underscore how the official story often differed from that of independent journalists, popularizing the term ‘present history,’ which is often under more debate than past history.
The entry for John McCain saw relatively few edits prior to his current presidency. However, controversy surrounding the details of his victory sparked furious debates across the internet, although little to no mention of it was made on mainstream news outlets. As such, his entry has been the most hotly contested on Wikipedia for the majority of his presidency, with individuals’ edits diminished in the wake of a new force: two politically motivated user groups, Patriot Force and Progressive Truth. Each enlists users to correct the alleged mistakes of the other’s edits, but their scope has broadened recently. What started as a partisan movement now threatens to consume all of Wikipedia.
The densely networked nature of Wikipedia complicates major factual changes, as edits in one article must be expanded to all related and otherwise linked articles. Altering information about a certain lobbyist group then requires subsequent alterations to the pages of political figures connected to that group, no matter the degree of involvement. Reminiscent of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, the complexity is self-evident of why organized user groups were needed to complete massive sweeps of edits in a timely manner. Both have leveraged the wiki framework to aid in coordinating edits across their ranks, using private databases to list the changes required for each page.
The revision history of McCain’s article is a startlingly uniform list of edits followed by reverted edits, often within a few seconds of each other. Popular bloggers have speculated on a resurgence of advanced sniping programs, used only to police the two groups’ respective borders; i.e., articles of primarily Democratic or Republican people or issues. “If used sparingly,” one Wired columnist postulates, “there may be no need for major response from Wikipedia’s staff.”
No need, indeed. Time will tell.
