Clinamen

My brother is the numbers guy in the family, and he could tell you a great deal more about the problems at Lehman Brothers these days. I won't even attempt a detailed discussion of it. The important point: Lehman Brothers is a casualty of the current "recession" (if the economists are using that word yet).

But even if I can't explain all that financial stuff, I am interested in this discussion of Lehman Brothers Wikipedia entry (thanks to my brother, a.k.a. "the numbers guy," for the link). It seems that the number of edits to the Lehman Brothers article on a given day is correlated with the stock price. While I won't go so far as saying that Wikipedia can predict stock prices, I think we can say that there's an interesting relationship between the number of edits and the price. The third point of "triangulation" (connecting edits and stock price) seems to be attention: the more Lehman Brothers stock price increases or decreases, the more human attention paid to them, and the more people edit the page. We've seen a similar effect on Sarah Palin's article, and some have even suggested that paying attention to those edits would have provided some early clues as to McCain's pick.

The "wisdom of crowds" arguments draw both wonder and skepticism these days. But beyond whether Wikipedia is "wise," we can at least note that it's an interesting gauge of which events, people, or companies people are paying attention to. Is it a good device for predicting? Probably not (at least, not yet). But if you want to know what folks are reading and writing about, Wikipedia is an interesting place to start.