Preemptive Wikipedia editing

Though it remains unclear if the McCain campaign or the Republican party initiated it, the editing work done on the Sarah Palin article just before she was announced as candidate again throws light on the importance of Wikipedia:

In total, YoungTrigg – whose user name is a reference to Ms. Palin’s infant son, Trig – made 30 “edits” to the article, all positive and largely unnoticed, since they came at a time when few were discussing her as a possible running mate of Senator John McCain’s.

This surely looks like a version of what I was circling in a post about the war in Georgia. Wikipedia as first stop for many users = Wikipedia will be a battleground. As the NYT articles also notes:

While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article shouldn’t come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to “define” yourself before your opponent “defines” you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy. When news breaks, and people plug a name into a search engine to find out more, invariably Wikipedia is the first result they click through to; it is where first impressions are made.