Wiki World: Wisdom of (Small) Crowds (Updated)

As a front-page article in Monday's Washington Post notes, the same debates over 2008 candidates that play out on newsprint and over the airwaves also make their way into Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit (in most cases). Because the Wiki model preserves all previous versions of a story, including information that has been deleted by subsequent contributors, it is possible to trace contentious issues by sifting through this virtual cutting-room floor. Pages also have a discussion boards where more devoted contributors can debate material before it appears on the main page.

The Wikipedia model makes it tempting to see the site as a battleground for legions of political junkies making the case for or against a candidate. As the Post writes, "every day thousands of them are engaging in fierce battles over the life stories of the 2008 presidential candidates."

The data tell a different story. Figures provided to U.S. News Monday by Compete.com, a site that monitors and analyzes Internet traffic, show that the majority of the edits to most of the candidate pages are made by a small group of devoted editors who largely determine what information is and is not included on a page.

In fact, the numbers as a whole are lower than one might expect from such a highly trafficked site. The page for Ron Paul, who has a loyal following on the Internet, was edited by 201 people in the month of August. Mitt Romney's page, coming in second, had 135 editors.

Update (Sept. 18, 4:45 p.m. ET): The full data is available here, courtesy of Compete.com.

Note: Tom Tancredo and Chris Dodd's Wikipedia articles attracted insufficient traffic for inclusion in this analysis