I just got a message from a Wiki mod saying “Your recent edits to this page were deemed unconstructive and have been reverted.” with a link to this page. Trouble is, I’ve never been on that page in my life, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither has anyone else from this computer.
The mod’s message quoted an IP address, but I’ve no idea if it’s actually mine. Is it possible that the message could have been sent to me in error? Or do I have to worry about someone else using my computer?
Potentially pertinent information:
1). I was not logged in. I don’t have a Wiki account.
2). The page in question has not, according to the history, been updated since March 14th.
3). There are no other computers on my network.
4). I’ve not contacted the mod. Firstly, I’ve not got a Wiki account so I’m unable to leave a message on his Talk page. Also, his e-mail response time is one week. Furthermore, he probably sends dozens of those types of message every day so there’s no guarantee he’d even remember me.
You omitted the most important information: How did you receive this message? Email? Telephone? Fax? Letter? SMS?
I don’t understand how you can have been contacted if you have no account? How did the Mod know where to make contact with you?
If you just got a “you have new messages” message when you visited the Wikipedia page, all that means is that someone else has been logging in from an IP address assigned to you. No biggie. Most ISPs have a range of IP addresses, and you get assigned an address within that range at random when you log on. You don’t get the same address each time. If you don’t have an account, Wikipedia just logs the address you are using at the time.
All that message means is that someone else using the same ISP from the same general geographic area made Wikipedia edits two weeks ago, then logged off. When you logged with your ISP on you were assigned the same address they were assigned back then.
You can just ignore it, however that means that if someone else starts vandalising Wikipedia, the IP address may be blocked permanently, meaning that you will often be unable to make any edits at all. If you want to avoid this, and any future messages, just create an account. It’s not hard.
My wife got one of those once. My son had “cleverly” wholesale copied a lot of his school paper from Wikipedia, then “even more cleverly” deleted the original. So if the teacher searched for the text, she wouldn’t find it, so it must be his original work. Win-win! My wife got the message since she was the first from our house to access Wikipedia after the “event”. ETA: In my wife’s case, the “message” was a web page that popped up instead of the Wikipedia page she wanted, based on her accessing Wikipedia from the IP address where the changes were made. He was surprised when his Mom brought it up. Stuff like that is probably pretty common, and I suspect is almost automatically reverted.
Another possible piece of you puzzle, if really no one in your house edited the page, is that if your IP address has recently been changed by your ISP, perhaps the previous person with that IP address did the edits. I’ve been watching our IP address lately (same son has a minecraft server running, so we need to know it for others to get to his server). It’s been changing every two to four weeks or so. Not sure why.
The most recent revert on that page occurred on November 19, 2011, over four months ago.
My conclusion is that (1) the mod who sent you that email is an idiot who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “recent”, or (2) you got taken by some cleverly worded spam.
I liked the Foxtrot cartoon:
Teacher: “Jason, this essay was supposed to be original. Yours is lifted word-for-word from Wikipedia.”
Jason: “Prove I didn’t write the Wikipedia article!”
Many ISPs change addresses occasionally to discourage using home service as a web server of any sort. For a fixed IP, pay for the commercial service.
Or (3) the mod assigned the message to that IP address when he fixed the page (within a minute of the vandalism), and Stelios is the first person using that IP address to access Wikipedia since.
I received a similar warning [when I went to look up something on Wikipedia] over my vandalising a page - I looked at the link and it was for a movie or somesuch.
I’d be very surprised if this happened as described. If it did, you have a particularly clever bit of malware on your computer serving up ads masquerading as having come from Wikipedia.
Well let me clear it up for you. I went to Wikipedia, there was a notification on the page telling me I’d vandalised a page with a link to said page. I looked and it was for a movie, or something, and wasn’t a page I’d ever looked at. Also I wasn’t even logged in to Wikipedia at the time. I checked online and found out that it was happening to other people and apparently it was a form of advertising as it was always accusing people of vandalising a page for a movie or a game.
Well then I’m getting rid of that anti malware thing on my PC since clearly it’s completely useless. Thank you for pointing that out to me.
Actually, what happened was almost certainly this:
Someone who wasn’t logged in vandalized a page about a movie or something.
Someone reverted that vandalism, and placed a warning on the talk page of the IP address.
Eventually, your ISP assigned that IP address to you.
You, not being logged in, received that message the next time you went to Wikipedia.
You “checked online” and found conspiracy theories about big media putting advertising (in the form of vandalism warnings) on the talk pages of random IP addresses.
There is no advertising on Wikipedia (except for when they advertise a pledge drive for donations so they don’t have to put advertising on the site). If you actually got an ad for a movie or game while on Wikipedia it could only be because malware is on your computer.
But in this case it may just be that you are confused and didn’t have any advertising at all. Unfortunately instead of reading this thread to find out what those notices mean you chose to believe it’s advertising and acted as if it were a fact instead of a crazy online rumor from people who don’t know what they are talking about.
Just so you are aware, no anti-malware software can be 100% successful in preventing malware from getting on a computer. If you act like you can’t be infected and download whatever you want because you already have some software installed then it is effectively useless, as you’re acting in a way that is going to get you infected.
It’s not entirely implausible that someone posted some spam to the talk page of the IP address. I haven’t heard of such a thing being very widespread, but there’s not much to stop it (except for some well-written anti-vandalism bots).
That said, I agree it’s more likely that someone else who had previously been assigned the IP address anonymously vandalized an article, and that incurred a warning on the talk page.
Corcaigh and Stelios could make it a lot easier to clear up these issues by posting links to the warnings in question. One of the beautiful things about Wikipedia is that everything stays recorded in the page histories.
Speaking as a Wikipedian, nobody expects that person using the IP today is the same person who used it three months ago, unless there’s a clear pattern in the edit history continuing through to today. I actually got one of those messages too many years back when Comcast did the old IP-switchup, and I was logged out.
As most everybody else has already noted: the most parsimonious explanation is that you’re seeing a new message because your IP was changed, and until I see some evidence otherwise, I’m not going to speculate about other possible explanations.
If you really can’t edit that talk page, well, that’s a violation of WP policy; and while it wouldn’t be the first time an administrator had done the like; this thread shows that there’s a good reason it’s policy.
Just looking at the Talk page of the IP addresses indicates the warning was added by an anti-vandalism bot, on November 19, 2011.
The bot’s page does require non-logged in users to jump though a hoop or two to report a false positive, but that’s not the case here so there’s no reason to complain about it. In fact, the bot did its job perfectly.
Well, obvious if I’d thought to click ClueBot’s link, or assigned a brain cell to it. It just seemed like a user name to me.
FWIW, I just got another message yesterday. My IP address had changed in the past week or so. Oddly, it’s from three years ago. While it’s certainly possible it’s been laying dormant for three years, it makes me wonder if something happened recently to cause them to come to the surface, so to speak.