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.

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)

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.