Last modified: 2008-09-12 22:29:45 UTC
I noticed that, during the time I made edits to the External links section of the article for [[Larry Craig]] article at the English Wikipedia site, a mysterious edit was made by someone else who added erroneous information to the article. The edit to the article performed by the other person occurred in the infobox, which is at the beginning of the article. The changes that I made to the article, on the other hand, was made to the end of the article by accessing the External links section by way of the edit link for that section. For my revisions, I recorded information about the each specific change in the edit summary. What appears in this case is that the changes to both sections were saved to the article at the same time. Because the changes were saved to the article at the same time, information about the named editor or IP address for the person who actually made the erroneous change to the article is absent from the edit history for that article. This situation has me really concerned, particularly since I consider my password a strong one that's likely to be cracked by anyone and that I am the only one who would be able to access my Wikipedia account. My real concern is that, if a person makes an erroneous change or vandalize the article, the erroneous change will be attributed to the wrong author. This situation opens up accusations of improper conduct in the revision of articles for an editor who had nothing to do with editing the article in an acceptable manner. Here are the changes that I made to the article (changes to the article in each case were noted in the edit summary: (a) first change to the article can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Craig&diff=prev&oldid=155722533, (b) second set of changes can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Craig&diff=next&oldid=155722533, and (c) the third revision to the article can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Craig&diff=next&oldid=155726194. Also, the mysterious change to the article that was erroneously recorded to my name can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Craig&diff=next&oldid=155727250. Please note that the section name "External Links" shows up in my third revision to the article and the mysterious edit attributed to my name, which was recorded at the same date same time.
My contribution history on the English Wikipedia can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Lwalt. The time and date in question can be found in the contribution history at 18:12, September 4, 2007.
The change was added by BenB4 at 12:27 UTC, 4 September 2007, before your edits: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Craig&diff=155615858&oldid=155584863 The relevant attributions seem fine; it doesn't appear in the revision-by-revision diffs for your edits. (It'll of course show up if you compare to a much older revision, since your edits did contain that text since they were already there.)
