The Obama administration is has started a discussion on their Change.gov site reports Nancy Scola. Launched yesterday, the health care discussion with two members of the transition team, Dr. Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson, on a wiki on Change.gov. This certainly strikes me as more transparent and constructive than the black hole of resumes with which the site started.

There's just one problem: it's not a wiki.

November 4th, a.k.a. Election Day, is just 50 days away. Everyone from the presidential campaigns to independent activists are turning their attention to the ground game; Is the liberal-leaning Netroots getting played by the GOP? A provocative though unsigned comment highlighted by the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a passionate Obama supporter, makes the case that indeed it is; The Democratic National Committee's new "Count the Lies" addition to its McCainpedia wiki takes a savvy tack on fact checking; and a whole lot more.

Video war continues between Obama and McCain, McCain is using Wikipedia, David All is impressed with McCain's online ads, Jame Hamsher has a new PAC to boast about, #dontgo campaign gets a little more support,

Mark Glaser interviews Patrick Ruffini; Rolling Stone glowingly investigates Obama's grassroots game; Mike Connery at TPMCafe; who's winning the Wikipedia primary?; Flickr for Good launches; and the candidates do some, er, interesting things with splash pages.

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.

Ron Paul and Mike Gravel are the dark horses of their respective parties. They raise a ruckus during debates and forums, they hold radical positions at odds with their parties' leadership, and they poll very low (Paul polls between one and three percent in all national polls; Gravel polls even lower). Not surprisingly, news coverage of them is scarce. So fired-up, web-savvy voters, tired of gatekeepers failing to mention more than half of debate participants in their post-mortems, are trying to influence media coverage and public opinion in the most straightforward way they know -- by writing and editing Wikipedia entries and Digging sympathetic news articles.

More Wikipedia un-controversies are uncovered, thanks to WikiScanner; Wired talks to David All about his Modern Media Strategies workshop; James Kotecki realizes that the candidates have been BREAKING THE LAW; Cracked produces a parody of the CNN/YouTube debate; Todd Zeigler on the most-viewed YouTube videos from the Dems; and more Facebook and MySpace friends could mean more votes.

Discovering the major and minor edits made to candidates' Wikipedia profiles; Jonah Goldberg argues against the idea that the web is inherently suited to liberals; surprising findings about the effect of Facebook and MySpace on political opinion; Change.org gets into the presidential quiz game; Newt launches a new site called "American Solutions"; and the difficulties of registering and logging into candidates' sites.

The New York Times needs to look a lot harder for questionable Wikipedia edits; Fred Thompson is hit with an FEC complaint; Mike Huckabee is gaining traction in website views; and Judy Feder produces a video that should instruct the candidates how to really listen to folks on the street.

What do William Gibson, George Orwell, Karl Rove, Chris Shays, Wikipedia and the rise of YouTube have to do with each other? Browsing today's news offerings, I find a connection.