User talk:140.185.55.78

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from Wikipedian: Cobra 18:54, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 140.185.55.78 is a Pentagon address...

Congressional member's staff were using Government resources to make anonymous edits to the Wikipedia it looks like there may be Pentagon workers who are choosing to make anonymous edits to the wikipedia.

Anonymous edits from the range of IP addresses from Congress had to be prohibited because those editors included so many vandals and editors who would not co-operate to try to maintain NPOV.

I came across this IP address because someone posting from here made an edit I thought was biased. -- Geo Swan 20:34, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion: This is not the best route for your complaint

I do not wish to quibble with your complaint, but I do want to point out both to you and any Wikipedia moderators supporting the above posting that, amazingly, at least 99.99% of the people reading the above message are not Congressional staffers posing as Pentagon workers. For the most part they are just ordinary workers who are trying to do quick lookups of Wikipedia because it is such a great resource. I am one of that vast majority. Since my IP address bears no resemblance to the one listed above, and since I emphatically did not change this or any of the apparently hundreds of other pages on which this message mysteriously pops up when one tries to look something up, I am baffled as to why I was even targeted.

While I can understand the frustration of not being able to contact whoever did whatever, I do not think Wikipedia as a whole should support this kind of inappropriate targeting of messages to very large groups, just on the off chance it will somehow connect. It is very much like stepping into the subway system every day and using a loudspeaker to protest at maximum volume how someone stepped on your toe several months ago, and would the real culprit please step up and confess? That is just not good etiquette, and it is my understanding good etiquette is a very large part of what the Wikipedia working model is all about. It is also a strategy that is very, very unlikely to work, since whoever did whatever is likely the absolute last person who would respond.

I do not delete anything in Wikipedia, except perhaps my own message here later on. But I would ask that others please reconsider a strategy that is very unlikely to produce useful results, while pretty much guaranteed to annoy a lot of honest Wikipedia users needlessly.

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