Wiki as an Intel Source?

There was an interesting article in the NY Times on last minute edits to Palin's Wikipedia page

The fact that campaign officials or others sympathetic to the McCain-Palin ticket spiced up here Bio is not surprising -- but using Wikipedia (or other Open Source collaborative knowledge-bases) to predict events in the real world, is.

Last year, a graduate student, Virgil Griffith, created a clever Web site, WikiScanner, that made it easy to detect where anonymous editors of Wikipedia were accessing the site. In the process, companies, government agencies and, yes, politicians were caught in the act of spiffing up their Wikipedia entries, even as many assumed that anonymity would make them safe. (Wikipedia, incredibly and mercilessly, keeps a record of every change made to every article.)

YoungTrigg made the last edit Friday morning, hours before the news of the Palin selection became official. But in the wee hours the day before, when no one was really paying attention, YoungTrigg did contact other Wikipedians, who were initially impressed by the rapid improvements to the article.