Unexpected results
On a post a couple of weeks ago, I noted that a miscreant had altered former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh’s page on Wikipedia:
Well, as of a couple of days ago, the vandalism has been removed. That piqued my curiosity as to who was behind the vandalism.
Poking around the page’s edit history file, I was surprised to learn that the nonsense about Walsh starting his career at Chatham Glenwood High School had been up since last Nov. 28.
While it would be impossible for a schmendrick like me to find out exactly who was responsible, I was interested in finding out from where the change was made. My first assumption was that it was some wiener kid at a Glenwood computer lab. Wikipedia logs the IP addresses of anonymous “contributors,” so I clicked on the address from the history page to learn more about it.
The first query was through DNSstuff.com’s WHOIS, and I was surprised to find out that the IP address was located in Jacksonville. The organization that owns the particular network is called the Illinois Century Network, which bills itself as
“… the largest publicly owned voice and data network in the country that serves nearly eight thousand schools, libraries, hospitals, municipalities, and other public institutions across the state.”
Interesting. Our tax dollars at work, I guess. The next querying tool Wikipedia offers is a reverse DNS lookup, and clicking on that reveals that IP address on a computer from Illinois College, specifically student215.ic.edu.
So instead of some wiener kid at Glenwood goofing off, it’s apparently some wiener student at Illinois College with too much free time. If you’re reading this, anonymous Glenwood grad at I.C., you are a douche. It’s people like you who give Wikipedia an undeserved bad reputation.
