Wikipedia and the 2008 US elections/Sarah Palin

Article history
The Sarah Palin article began as a stub on 18 October, 2005, created by an unregistered editor. In November, 2005, it was greatly expanded and improved, primarily by one contributor, and lost the stub tag (Note: The image that appears on that diff is not the same file that was used in the original article). The article was edited a total of 86 times during 2005.

In 2006, the article was edited 157 times. Contributions included the addition of both text and a number of infoboxes.

In 2007, there were 197 edits, including a major expansion of references.

In 2008, there were 10,727 edits.

In January, 2009, there were 158 edits.

Talk page history
The talk page was created February 27, 2006, with a Wikiproject template. There were a total of 9 talk page edits in 2006, and 10 in 2007.

In 2008, there were a total of 86 edits before August 29 (the day John McCain announced her to be his choice for running mate). In total, there were 20,525 edits during 2008.

In January, 2009, there were 1,057 edits to the talk page.

Snapshots

 * First edit
 * 25th edit
 * 50th edit
 * 100th edit
 * 250th edit
 * 500th edit
 * 1,000th edit
 * 2,000th edit
 * 3,000th edit
 * 4,000th edit
 * 5,000th edit
 * 6,000th edit
 * 7,000th edit
 * 8,000th edit
 * 9,000th edit
 * 10,000th edit
 * 11,000th edit
 * 12,000th edit


 * November 4th, 2008

Editors

 * As of 5 February, 2009, there were nearly 2,000 contributors to the article (including bots and unregistered). More than half of these only made one edit. 101 editors (again, including bots and unregistered) made more than 20 edits, 18 made more than 100, 5 made more than 200, and one made over 900.


 * /Editor survey/ in progress.

Daughter articles
See Category:Sarah Palin

Basic questions

 * 1) was the article started as a stub? if so, how long did it take to lose the stub tag?
 * 2) did wikipedia have an article on the subject before the election? if so, compare the article before and after
 * 3) were daughter articles created? if so, when? were all of the daughter articles kept?
 * 4) what was the relationship between talk page edits and article edits?
 * 5) were there edit wars? if so, what were they about, and did they coincide with campaign events?
 * 6) was the article protected or placed under probation? if so, why and for how long?
 * 7) did the campaigns themselves edit the articles?
 * 8) was the article itself ever in the news?

Timeline
Development needed for a timeline with edits by day, week, or month, sorted by:
 * 1) anon, user, and sysop
 * 2) content edits, minor edits (copyedits and so on), reverted edits, vandal edits, reverted vandal edits
 * 3) mark major campaign events on the timeline to see if there is any correlation between number of edits and news events

External studies

 * http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/09/sarah-palin/