06-30-2007, 12:27 AM
Since the Wikipedia thing is more of an internet story, I knew not to trust MSNBC with the journalistic investigation. Instead, I went to SomethingAwful and found this
Quote:Yesterday it was widely reported by Fox News, the Associated Press, ABC News, digg and a host of other news sites that an anonymous user on Wikipedia altered the online encyclopedia's article on Chris Benoit noting the death of the pro-wrestler's wife 13 hours before police found the dead bodies of Benoit, his wife, and 7-year old son. The incident is being treated as a murder-suicide.
What the anonymous user on Wikipedia may have failed to realize, is that little about your activity on Wikipedia is anonymous.
Anytime an edit is made to a Wikipedia page, that information along with the user's IP address is logged by the site and publicly accessible. A simple check of these logs paints a much clearer picture of the person who made the aforementioned edits: not someone affiliated with the WWE as the mainstream media suggested, but rather a teenager from UConn who just finished his first year of college and vandalizes Wikipedia on a regular basis.
The user who made the Benoit Wikipedia edit also made a several changes dating back to May 16th of this year. In one edit to the page on Naugatuck, Connecticut page, he replaces the name of the town's mayor to Marc Dagz, adding Visar Tasimi as the deputy mayor and also adding the name Burton Barnes to the page.
When these names are cross-referenced on the social-networking website facebook, it is revealed that both Dagz and Barnes are friends and current UConn students, whose hometown is, unsurprisingly, Naugatuck, Connecticut. A check to Tasimi's facebook and MySpace pages shows he is also a friend of the other two from Naugatuck and attending UConn. All of the three recently finished their first year of college. While not knowing which person made the edits for certain, given the specific nature of the other edits and corroborating evidence, it seems almost certain the edits were made by either Marc Dagz, Visar Tasimi, or Burton Barnes (and one might lean towards Dagz, given that he made himself the mayor of his own hometown).
The IP address associated with the user was also widely reported in the media as resolving to Stamford, Connecticut - the headquarters of the WWE. While these facts are in and of themselves true, what the mainstream media neglected to mention was that the IP address resolves to the Internet Service Provider of the user and the physical location of the ISP's server. The ISP in this case is Optimum Online, a provider of high-speed internet access across Connecticut - and the location of this server is less than 50 miles away from Naugatuck.
The user was also warned several times in the past for vandalizing and posting erroneous information on Wikipedia. Among them:
On Stacy Keibler:
People want to @!$%# her in her lovely @!$%# and whip her ass til the dawn of day. Many people fantasize about ramming their cocks up her @!$%#.
Regarding Ron Artest:
Artest is a piece of @!$%# nigger!!!!!!!
At one point he also replaces the entire page on the African Wild Ass with, simply, 'piss.'
No, this wasn't a person who had foreknowledge of a tragic murder-suicide, it was an immature college freshman with too much time on his hands and a bad sense of humor.
Moral of the story: Your actions on Wikipedia, facebook, and MySpace are hardly anonymous, and it would be wise not to treat them as such (and if given the option, the media will run with half of a story that might turn out to be dubious, in the name of being first and provocative).