On 12/30/07, wikipediaman troyknight@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
On a particular contentious article I'm editing, there are 3 IP addresses editing the article on one side of the debate. After looking these IP's up on http://www.ip-adress.com/, 2 are from the same city and 1 is from a city 30 miles away.
Unless a registered account has edited from all three IP addresses there's no connection to be established other than geography and behavior. This would mean it is quite possibly the same person editing from several locations, possibly public computers, or it could be two or three different people who know each other in real life and have coordinated their activity in editing a particular article.
Policy says:
"For the purposes of dispute resolution, the Arbitration Committee has ruled that when there is uncertainty whether a party is one user with sock puppets, or several users acting as meatpuppets, they may be treated as one entity."
This theory is muddied a bit as the user(s) in question are not editing from multiple accounts, but with none at all.
Consider also the possibility that it is one person, editing from multiple locations without an account, who may not realize that others may automatically assume that the use of varying IP addresses is a deliberate attempt to deceive, when it might not be.
You could try asking him/her/them what they're up to.
—C.W.