I've decided that there's nothing richer than catching the clique in an unintentional IP edit, and would like to list some of my favorites for you and hope you'll reciprocate.

1- Jimbo as vandal.
Long story how I know this, but suffice it to say that last winter, Jimbo Wales' home IP was 69.22.75.205. Here are some of the edits he made during that time while not logged in. Read them if you want, but with the exception of this edit to the Jeff Merkey article, they're not very interesting.

Here's what's interesting.

Missing from 69.22.75.205's edit history is an edit only evidenced by a note on 69.22.75.205's talk page. Whatever Jimbo initially did to alter the debate over deletion of the autobiography of Gary Weiss was interpreted as vandalism and reverted.

That happened at 16:00 (UCT).

One hour later he made two more edits as Jimbo Wales.

About that time he appears to have been made aware that his IP edit didn't take, and so at 17:11 (UTC) he deleted the whole thing.

As Jimbo later explained, he did it because the deletion debate contained some "discourteous commentary." (Challenge: find the discourtesy in this rescued record of what Jimbo deleted.)


2- Possible evidence of a SlimVirgin + Crum375 sock connection.
Yet again a long story, but trust me when I say that I know Crum375's home IP has been 67.85.164.120 for some time now. Crum has made mountains of unintentional IP edits, and I posted a link to them on the talk page for Crum375 on Wikiabuse.com last week (my intention was actually to prove that Crum and Slim were different people).

Because 67.85.164.120 had so many edits, I didn't bother to check more than a few to verify that they were clearly Crum's. But this guy MichaelLinnear on Wikiabuse apparently dug deeper and says he found evidence in this edit history of SlimVirgin also apparently editing from 67.85.164.120.

This would be a fascinating development, but for the fact that the entire edit history of 67.85.164.120 was shortly thereafter oversighted out of existence.

Yes...oversighted.

3- A cover-up on Wall Street.
Speculation as to Gary Weiss's obsession with control over the articles on Overstock.com, it's CEO Patrick Byrne, and Naked short selling were put to rest earlier this year when this edit history was discovered.

Weiss, whose sockdrawer is led by Mantanmoreland, created the article on St. Joseph's Church to further his claim that he's really a Catholic gen-Xer. As any wikipedian will quickly recognize, on January 9, 2007, Weiss's first edit of the day was made before logging in.

The IP edit that resulted is attributed to 207.45.43.68, which happens to be one of two main IPs used by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which is the organization charged with settling about a quadrillion stock trades each year. The DTCC is also the organization Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has said acts an enabler of perpetrators of illegal naked short selling of many public companies.

Naked shorting is very bad, regardless of what Weiss has edited the article on the subject to read.

The DTCC is not one of those businesses where a buddy might stop by during lunch and use your computer to check his email. It's a fortress. From this incident, we can reasonably conclude that Gary Weiss is using DTCC computers in some official capacity.

This situation gets still more sordid, as you can read here.

Bottom line: ¡Viva la unintentional IP edit!