Last year, a graduate student, Virgil Griffith, created a clever Web site, Wiki- Scanner, that made it easy to detect where anonymous editors of Wikipedia were accessing the site. In the process, companies, government agencies and, yes, politicians were caught in the act of spiffing up their Wikipedia entries, even as many assumed that anonymity would make them safe. (Wikipedia, incredibly and mercilessly, keeps a record of every change made to every article.)

YoungTrigg made the last edit Friday morning, hours before the news of the Palin selection became official. But in the wee hours the day before, when no one was really paying attention, YoungTrigg did contact other Wikipedians, who were initially impressed by the rapid improvements to the article.

Image Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska is running as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Credit... Jim Witmer/Cox News Service

YoungTrigg was given a virtual unit of praise, the Barnstar, for the effort. When another Wikipedia contributor asked gently if YoungTrigg could include page numbers to his footnotes from “Sarah,” YoungTrigg wrote back excitedly: “Thank you! I’m afraid I didn’t use the page numbers when I did the edits, so I don’t have them now. The book has a pretty good index, though, and I can look something up if anything I added was controversial. I apologize if I misunderstood the format.”

Also, YoungTrigg reached out to an anonymous editor who had changed the Palin article on Thursday night, without any evidence, to say that she was Mr. McCain’s choice. In a public note to the anonymous editor, YoungTrigg wrote: “Where did you hear that Palin was the VP nominee? I can’t find anything online.”

Whether this pokes a hole in the idea that YoungTrigg had inside information, or rather confirms that the user had an unusually acute interest in whether the news had leaked out, is hard to tell.

Or maybe it was dumb luck. When news outlets like National Public Radio and Washingtonpost.com reported on the editing on Friday, they classified it as another example of Wikipedia’s mysterious ability to predict about-to-break news, if we only knew to look there. When the liberal Web site Daily Kos, enmeshed in the rough-and-tumble of the presidential election, picked up on the news in a highly read post, commenters were quick to raise the specter of dirty tricks.