Saturday, February 23, 2008

Thomas the Tank Engine III: or how 208 = 202 = 200 = 80 = 78 = 81

We have been exploring the edits made to Wikipedia by a series of Rogers IPs in 2003 and 2004. The editor shows consistent interest in a group of articles, many of which relate to the children's program Thomas the Tank Engine.

One such article was its American spin-off Shining Time Station.  Here is the edit history of its first six weeks (the logs read from the bottom):
    14:42, 31 December 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:22, 30 December 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:21, 30 December 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:19, 30 December 2003 66.185.84.208
    23:27, 12 November 2003 Dysprosia m (fmt)
    23:27, 12 November 2003 Minesweeper (fmt)
    23:00, 12 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:59, 12 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:58, 12 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:44, 12 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:41, 12 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    00:15, 12 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:30, 10 November 2003 66.185.84.208
    20:14, 10 November 2003 66.185.84.202 (Talk)
As you can see, the article was first created on Nov. 10, 2003 by an anonymous editor using the Rogers IP 66.185.84.202. Only minutes later, 66.185.84.208 edited it, and continued over the next few days. Over the coming months, it is slowly built-up by Rogers IPs such as 66.185.84.200 in this edit of March 2004.  And those of 66.185.84.208, 66.185.84.80, and 66.185.84.81 here:
    22:56, 20 November 2004 66.185.84.81
    00:10, 10 November 2004 66.185.84.208
    21:33, 23 October 2004 66.185.84.80
The five or six Rogers IPs related to this article do not, presumably, show that there was a hot-bed of interest for Shining Time Station in one neighbourhood in Southern Ontario.  Rather, this is again an illustration of how fluid the IPs were in those years: one editor with an interest in Thomas the Tank Engine was assigned different IP addresses at different times.