Readers of this blog have no need for another example of how much the Internet is changing political campaigns. The extent, however, that a candidates "Internet Reputation" affects their election is ultimately unmeasurable and as a result, overlooked.

That includes the candidate's Wikipedia profile. According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the 8th most visited website in the US.

With some help from a friend (cough- William Beutler- cough) with greater expertise regarding Wikipedia, I recently acquired some Wikipedia statistics from the month of February for every Congressman in my home state of Indiana.

The number is how many times the page was viewed in February. The link is to the statistics.
429 -- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Pete_Visclosky
1042
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Baron_Hill
1069
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Steve_Buyer
1250
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Joe_Donnelly
1335
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Brad_Ellsworth
1873
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Mark_Souder
2419
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Andre_Carson
2456
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Mike_Pence
19648
-- http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Dan_Burton

Note that 5th District Congressman Dan Burton's profile saw an additional 17,500 views in February from January, a two-day spike as a result of the Clemens hearings.

For more even more enlightening detail, I pulled the chart below of Burton's Wikipedia traffic in the month of April. In April, Burton's Primary campaign was in full swing (election was May 5). The two big spikes came on April 14th and April 28th. On the 14th, Burton's opponent began his TV campaign. On the 28th, the Indianapolis Star ran an editorial about the race critical of Burton.

Sometimes a candidate can generate a buzz offline with a good Internet operation. But also, candidates need to keep in mind that they will generate online activity by offline actions. Offline campaign activities like direct mail blitzes, TV stories, and campaign commercials will result in additional searches on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo- both of which generally give Wikipedia top billing. You need to make sure that your voters are finding positive information.

Pay attention to Wikipedia- your voters are.

A note from Gabriela Schneider of the Sunlight Foundation alerts us about the launch of a new project which seeks to help provide more information about political candidates running for office:

We are launching something new over at Congresspedia.org this morning -- "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008.

The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.

The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.

We often discuss new ways to make congressional data available on this list. It’s equally important to let citizens have access to user-friendly information about Congress. This project does that by turning data on earmarks, campaign contributions, etc. into narrative with information that citizens can use. Check out the site, and let me know what you think.

Check it out folks and start updating the members that you care about.