The perl script that powered the Alan Turing petition

blog.jgc.org

25 points·jgrahamc··7 comments

Nice idea. I guess you could still do something similar by looking for verified accounts tweeting with your campaign hashtag(s). Or accounts that are otherwise 'known' to be a celeb - there must be a directory out there.

'known' to be a celeb - there must be a directory out there

This is essentially what they did. Use Wikipedia as that directory. If you have the real name, you can check it.

This doesn't seem to account for the fact that multiple people can have the same name. I don't play hockey, nor am I Canadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Picard

That's presumably why the author had the list sent to him: to manually verify the potential VIP signatories before promoting them in the media.

That's probably a good opportunity to make sure that they're comfortable with being used to promote the petition too. The script / using big names to promote the cause is a pretty smart idea.

No, I mean, with twitter you have ids and you can map those to real people. You often won't have a name other than the id, and the id won't normally be in wikipedia. For example, '@antanddec' is the twitter account for two UK tv presenters, but the account doesn't have their full names spelled out. It is verified though, which is usually a clue that they're someone (relatively) famous.

Also, unlike wikipedia, it is unambiguous - you can easily check that it is the celeb and not someone else with the same name (eg @warrenellis, who isn't the musician)

> You often won't have a name other than the id, and the id won't normally be in wikipedia

I wonder how long before this stops being the case. (e.g., http://i.imgur.com/Eiq5h.png)

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