On 12/30/07, wikipediaman <troyknight(a)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.