In a recent survey, I found that Wikipedia has an expansive influence in organic Google search results for 2008 presidential candidates. For each candidate, their Wikipedia entry is ranked no lower than 5th place by Google. In addition, the Wikipedia entry ranks higher than the election web presence of that particular candidate for 25% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans. There is no other entity on the web that plays such a systematically influential role in candidate information positioning as Wikipedia, pointing to its increased importance as a messaging tool in the 2008 cycle. A full breakdown of candidate search result positions follows:

This is truly eye-opening data. Wikipedia's influence is systematic and pervasive, perhaps to the point of overreaching. Should Wikipedia outrank a candidate's electoral site? Clearly, this shows that monitoring Wikipedia is a must for every campaign - thankfully Wikipedia makes this easy with RSS-based monitoring.

Wikipedia's role in the 2008 cycle will be interesting to follow. Over the next few months, I'll be looking at candidate Wikipedia presence and attempting to make some sense of the possibilities.

Caveats about this data and methodology: This represents a one-time analysis of Google search results. These results may and will change over time. The queries were directed to Google.com, from a US-based location. Other Google national sites may provide dissimilar results. Queries were constructed exactly as transcribed - i.e. no quotes around names, or special techniques.

Footnotes:
(1) - This is the search rank of the candidate's main site, if the candidate has a main site different from their electoral web presence. For example, John McCain or Dennis Kucinich's Congressional web presence.
(2) - This is the search rank of the candidate's electoral web presence, the home of their presidential campaign or their exploratory committee.
(3) - This is the search rank of the candidate's main Wikipedia entry.
(4) - An "Outrank" is declared if the Wikipedia page outranks the candidate's electoral web presence.
(5) - A result was not found in the top ten search results.