Wikipedia and the whereabouts of Weiss
Because IP addresses have grown increasingly scarce and expensive, large organizations often use sophisticated routers allowing hundreds of computers (or more) to share a very small number of IP addresses; in contrast, routers priced for residential users tend to limit IP address sharing to just a few computers.
Thanks to data routing technology, hundreds of employees of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) in New York City manage to use the internet while consuming just two primary IP addresses: 207.45.43.67 and 207.45.43.68.
When actively logged in to Wikipedia, one’s edits are attributed to one’s username. Edits made while not logged in (or by those yet to create an account) are attributed to the unique IP address assigned to the computer from which the edits were made.
As those familiar with Wikipedia’s extensive edit tracking system will quickly recognize, the article edit history shown here reveals something interesting about a particular user (starting from the bottom and moving up):
An editor calling himself “Mantanmoreland” created the Wikipedia article on St. Joseph’s Church in New York City at 09:03 on 12/25/2006, followed promptly by two more quick edits at 09:04 and 09:05.
For nearly four weeks, the article went un-touched. Then at 10:57 on 1/19/2007, an edit attributed to IP address 207.45.43.68 is made, followed shortly by two more edits attributed to Mantanmoreland, who makes two more edits a few days later.
Save a single, recent automated housekeeping edit (not shown here), in the five months since its creation, only Mantanmoreland and IP address 207.45.43.68 have contributed to this article.
This editing pattern is frequently seen in cases where the first edit of the day (as this would have been for Mantanmoreland) is made before the editor realizes that he or she is not logged in: not an uncommon occurrence on Wikipedia.
In light of the extremely thin interest in editing this article, and the neatly sandwiched placement of the IP address edit relative to those of Mantanmoreland, it’s very likely that the person behind Mantanmoreland was also the person behind 207.45.43.68.
As has been proven and re-proven, Mantanmoreland is one of several Wikipedia usernames belonging to Gary Weiss.
As one can independently verify, the IP address 207.45.43.68 is assigned to computers at the DTCC.
From this, we conclude that on 1/19/2007 at 10:57, Gary Weiss was using a computer on the DTCC network.
