As we've seen, Wikipedia is a valuable source of information about presidential candidates. For all of the candidates, Wikipedia claims a prized top-five spot in Google results, with candidate entries frequently trafficked and edited. Reminiscent of Virgil's Wikiscanner, a team of scientists in the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at Xerox's PARC have invented WikiDashboard, a tool they claim provides social transparency to Wikipedia. About their invention, the team states:

The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

WikiDashboard acts as an overlay of Wikipedia, providing a series of graphs showing active editors, periods of intensity, and how those periods of intensity correlate to editing behavior. The idea is to provide Wikipedia readers with a set of cues about the type of edits going on in an entry. Looking at the the Wikidashboard for Hillary Rodham Clinton, we can see that while Wasted_Time_R (a fella we interviewed here) has consistently put up a volume of edits over time, we've seen many other users edit the article intentley for brief periods of time. The cues provided by the visualization might tell us to be skeptical of the article of a new editor is currently contributing lots of edits. The PARC folks have provided a guide for understanding these visualizations on their blog.

Aside from being really cool, WikiDashboard might be particularly useful for understanding Wikipedia entries not particularly amenable to consensus, such as presidential entries. Here are two visualizations, Ron Paul and John Edwards:

I'm impressed. Check out WikiDashboard here, and find out more at the Augmented Social Cognition Group blog.