At 4:49 am on 19 October 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user created a new page titled “Sarah Palin.” It read, in full:

Republican Party (United States) candidate for governor for the state of Alaska. Sarah is the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska

Sure, the first sentence is incomplete (which another editor corrected that day), the second is missing its period, and her last name doesn’t feature anywhere in the article, but she had her very own Wikipedia page.

As early as 2 November 2005 we got this telling sentence from user Tko ak:

Despite being considered a maverick by many for rebuking her own party, her conservative political credentials remain intact.

Huh! She really is a maverick!

The page grew into a full article on her governorship and beyond until 6:57 pm on 12 August, when Paul007ex added this paragraph:

Governor Sarah Palin has been mentioned as Vice President contendor (sic) by a number of different media outlets. Governor Sarah Palin has a strong online member support for her Vice Presidency appeal.

It had undergone 714 revisions in total before then. Between 12 August and 29 August (when McCain announced his running mate) another quick 187 revisions speculated on her place in the 2008 campaign, including the controversial Young Trigg edits.

And after the 29th? In just three days editors tacked on 2,364 new changes – about 2½ times the total volume of edits in the prior history of the page.

Over 6,200 more have gone through in September and October (to present).

At first I was considering creating a time lapse video of the page (as has been done before for other articles) but then I calculated that if done to scale there’d be three minutes of glacial nothingness followed by five to ten seconds of explosive change.