What Wikipedia Can Tell Us about the NDP Race

... beside who the candidates are and how to spell their names.

You might have forgotten that the NDP leadership race is still going on, although you'd be forgiven, what with the holidays, a dearth of debates, and a media still getting used to putting the words "official opposition" in a dependent clause after the party's name. But with the next leader's debate just under three weeks away, and the March 24 vote inching closer each day, you'll surely start seeing the names Peggy Nash, Paul Dewar, Brian Topp, and especially Thomas Mulcair in print more and more often. Why Mulcair, in particular? While there's been a surprising lack of polls taken on the public's perception of the eight leadership candidates, ThreeHundredEight.com's Eric Grenier is using another means to determine interest in the candidates: Wikipedia. As he writes in The Globe and Mail, the number of visits each candidate's Wikipedia entry receives could be an accurate indication of public support. After all, during the Ontario election, eventual winner Dalton McGuinty's page received more views than that of runner-up Tim Hudak, whose page also had more traffic than third-place finisher Andrea Horwath of the NDP. Ditto for the Alberta PC leadership race, in which supposed underdog Alison Redford had more traffic headed to her page than supposed frontrunner Gary Mar, and the Bloc Quebecois leadership race, in which Daniel Paille won both the party's crown (tarnished as it is) and the Wikipedia contest.

So what does Wikipedia have to say about the eight candidates in the NDP race? Between September and December, Thomas Mulcair, the party's lone Quebec MP until the May election, led all candidates in traffic to his page, with 17,806 visits in that time. Barely behind him was Brian Topp, with 16,647. Niki Ashton, the youngest candidate in the race, and Martin Singh, a Sikh pharmacist from Nova Scotia, came in third and fourth, although Grenier figures this has more to do with their relative obscurity and defining characteristics (youth, Sikh-ness). Peggy Nash and Paul Dewar, who are often grouped alongside Topp and Mulcair as leadership heavyweights, were fifth and sixth, respectively. Of course, interest in a candidate hardly means support, and who knows how much of the traffic to these sites was from journalists on deadline struggling to find out just who the heck half the candidates are? Likewise, since the leadership vote is based solely on members of the NDP, interest from the general population does not equate interest from within the party. But in the absence of polls or other measurements, Wikipedia traffic is emerging as an interesting, if incomplete, means of predicting the fortunes of would-be leaders.