Just who are these 'superdelegates' and why do they matter?

The tight race between Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has brought with it an increased focus on the so-called superdelegates, some of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention who are chosen based on their status as current or former elected officials and who are not bound to a vote based on primary or caucus results in the states.

If you’ve ever wondered who these people are or what their potential impact on the race for the White House will be, there’s a new wiki to add to your favorite online data sources.

The Superdelegate Transparency Project (STP)
is a project of LiteraryOutpost.com, OpenLeft , DemConWatch and the Congressipedia community on SourceWatch that is focused on tracking district-by-district results of the popular votes from primaries and caucuses and the resulting pledged delegates against the superdelegate pledges until the Democratic Convention.

STP noted that “the aim of this project is to open up the Democratic nomination process, and to gauge what effect the superdelegates have on the nomination. Rather than hypotheticals at the end of this nomination process, we seek to make hard data available to all interested parties including citizens, activists, journalists, bloggers, campaign staffers and people around the world who are following this U.S. election. This is the only project currently tracking this data at the district level.”

And the STP is becoming more and more relevant every day it seems as Obama racked up victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii Tuesday, his ninth and tenth in a row. As of Tuesday, Clinton has received endorsements from 240 superdelegates compared to Obama’s 162, according to the DemConWatch blog. Compare that to Clinton’s 165 pledged superdelgates on Jan. 13 versus Obama’s 69 on that date.

Like Wikipedia, the project also allows users to help out by updating, adding to or correcting information about the superdelegates from each state.

Paul Glazowski, a blogger at Mashable, noted that STP “offers perhaps the best collection of data to be found anywhere on the Web at present pertaining to commonly unknown facts about the Democratic Party."He went on to note that the STP is simple to operate and that "its tables offer straightforward summaries of information the partner sites have so far been able to gather. Because it is an inherently open platform, its designers have made it a point to solicit support from the public at large, which considerably fortifies its reliability.”