The recent story about Congressional staffers editing their bosses’ Wikipedia entries sure shows that a lot of Congressional staffers don’t understand how Wikipedia works. Or maybe it’s just a lack of understanding of what an IP address is and how it leads back to your office?
These people were editing pages to make their bosses look better (or to take shots at the ones they didn’t like), but without first setting up a Wikipedia account. If you don’t have an account, the wiki logs all your edits with your IP address, and makes that visible on the history page so everyone else can see made what edits to each page.
If you’re at a workplace large enough to have its own IP allocation (like, say, Congress) then the IP address will point right back to your office. It’s not really that complicated.
I guess it is a little counter-intuitive if you haven’t looked at how Wikipedia works; if you want to make anonymous edits, it’s best to register for an account and make your edits from that account. Otherwise you’re exposing your IP address to the entire Internet. In that case, the only way to see what IP address you were editing from is to get the Wikipedia administrators to check their logs and pull it out. It’s going to be in there so they can keep track of abuse, but it’s not wide open and available to the public in that case.
If you really need anonymous Wikipedia editing, I don’t think there’s a great solution yet. Tor is a pretty good one, but unfortunately, due to abuse, most Tor exit nodes are banned from editing Wikipedia. The Tor people and the Wikimedia people are still trying to work out a good way to allow anonymized edits while still being able to block abusers.
But, for those of you wanting to smear your office’s opponents, go sign up for an account. Then brag about it to a reporter over drinks so you can be busted anyway, but at least it’ll be a more entertaining story.