Clinamen

Nate Silver at 538.com has dubbed Sarah Palin the "Wikipedian Candidate":

The problem is that Palin's faults have been precisely those sorts of things that might be difficult to detect from a Wikipedia page. For instance: her tendency to let her nerves get the better of her in interviews, her seeming lack of intellectual curiosity, and the way that her mannerisms, fairly or not, could easily become the butt of jokes. When I saw her debut event in Dayton, I was underwhelmed, asking "how will SNL and Jay Leno react?" and declaring that "this is a pick that looks better on paper than in practice".

Silver goes on to call the Palin pick an example of "death-by-focus-group" since McCain picked Palin as a compromise between Lieberman and Romney. And he argues that "in a post-Wikiepdia[sic] universe, in which the quantity of information may too easily be conflated for its quality, such mistakes may be all the easier to succumb to."

I think Silver is absolutely right that Palin's "surface" success is much like the surface of a Wikipedia article. As he notes, once you get deeper...things change. The Veneer wears off. But note that Silver is drawing a comparison between a Wikipedia "page" and our first impressions of Palin. Silver's first impression of Palin was that she looked good "on paper." What happens if we think beyond the print paradigm?

The Wikipedia article is certainly a page, and at any given moment it mimics paper. But only at any given moment. That is, it moves constantly. Unless you have downloaded a "stable" version of Wikipedia or put it on a CD-ROM, you are looking at an unstable text that is always on the move. As I noted in a previous post, Wikipedia can be an interesting predictive tool...but only if you look at the mess that sits behind the "page." One could have predicted that McCain would pick Palin as his running mate, but they couldn't have done this by looking at the article. They would have had to look closely at the edit history. There are any number of other datasets one could parse when it comes to a Wikipedia article: the IP addresses of writers, the talk page, the vandalism. Is this on the page? Is this paper? Not really.

Silver notes that the public has been much more discerning than the media when it comes to Palin (there are a number of problems with this argument...not the least of which is that the "media" and the "public" are in no way separate from one another), and he points to her recent numbers. People have, on the whole, realized that Palin is in way over her head. But anyone who argues that McCain (or "we") didn't go "deep enough" in vetting Palin is missing the point. The Palin pick was all about surface. It was all about style. And this is the most interesting point that comes out of Silver's discussion of the post-Wikipedia moment we are in. Given more access to information than we've had (historically speaking), what do we default to? Style. Surface. This is Richard Lanham's argument when he says that we need an "economics of attention." We need new ways of marshaling eyeballs, and style is one way to think about that.

But texts like Wikipedia provide a lot more than "death by focus group," and this is because all that messy stuff that doesn't fit is still there under the surface, beyond "the page," outside the edges of "paper." So while Palin might be the "Wikipedian candidate," the metaphor carries more than Silver probably intended. Because in addition to a shiny surface, both Palin and her Wikipedia article have a lot of complicated, messy stuff happening behind the scenes. The post-Wikipedia universe only leaves us on the surface of the page if we neglect to look inside.