[WikiEN-l] Range Contribs tool; anti-vandal software; anon IPs' User-Agents; the netblocks that vandalize the most; etc.

[Unforgettableid]

Hi all,

I was curious about a vandalistic edit[1]:  the logged-out vandal, who uses a
US-based home broadband ISP[2][3], has made only one edit:  the vandalistic edit
I mentioned.  The edit was made two days ago.  I reverted it, then tried using
Soxred93's useful Range Contributions tool[4] to see if any of the 255 IP
addresses closest to the vandal's IP had ever made any other edits.  Nope.[5] 
In fact, not even any of the closest 131072 have done so.[6]  But when I
expanded my search to the closest 262144, I found lots of edits over the past
few weeks, made by a variety of IPs.  I looked at the first seven.  One was
vandalism:  an edit[7] to [[Patrick Stump]].  Someone else has since reverted
it.  It was made by another user from the same ISP.[8]  I am just curious:

A)  Did I go too far when I did all the research I described above?  Do you
yourself often use the Range Contributions tool[4] for looking at vandals' ISPs'
contributions?

B)  What do you think are the chances that the same person made both the
first[1] and the second[7] vandalistic edits?  The IP addresses' binary
representations are quite different.

C)  Why did no anti-vandalism software automatically revert either edit?

D)  When I look at the history[9] of [[Patrick Stump]], I see that there were
fourteen edits between 06:51 and 07:03, most vandalism.  Yet the vandalistic
edits come from a variety of IP addresses and usernames.  The IP addresses
differ widely from each other.  Why is this?

E)  When comparing two vandals' edits in other situations, is there any quick
way for editors to find out both IPs' hostnames, User-Agents, Accept-Charset
strings, Accept-Language strings, screen resolutions, and/or IP geolocation
results?  I do very little vandalism removal, so I myself am not sure.

F)  Which netblocks do the most vandalism and the least useful editing?  Which
cities?  Which entire countries?  Should those netblocks, cities, and countries
be forced to log in before editing?

G)  Wouldn't it be cool if some web browsers or ISPs would tell Wikipedia what a
contributor's PPPoE username was whenever the contributor made an edit?

If you reply to only one of A), B), C), D), E), F), or G) then please use a
different subject line than I used.  And add a "(was: ...)" tag at the end of
the subject line.  That way, it'll be easier for others to follow just the parts
of the discussion that they want to follow.

Kind regards,
--[[User:Unforgettableid]]

^  [1]. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fetus_in_fetu&diff=prev&oldid=339770615
^  [2].  http://toolserver.org/~chm/whois.php?ip=174.105.248.31
^  [3].  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_Runner_High_Speed_Online
^  [4].  http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/rangecontribs/
^  [5]. 
http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/rangecontribs/index.php?type=range&ips=174.105.248.31/8&limit=100
^  [6]. 
http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/rangecontribs/index.php?type=range&ips=174.105.248.31/15&limit=100
^  [7]. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patrick_Stump&diff=prev&oldid=339703861
^  [8].  http://toolserver.org/~chm/whois.php?ip=174.106.99.246
^  [9].  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patrick_Stump&action=history