The Hellfire Club and other wiki edits

Lots of people have started talking about the nifty bit of code that has been written to scan Wikipedia edits by IP address. As one would expect, political parties have been added as well as the BBC who have, it seems, been editing Wikipedia some 7000+ times.

The thing is, what does this actually mean in reality? Most Enterpise wide networks are going to be using network address translation so, on a network like the BBC's, which probably has over 10,000 corporate users worldwide, almost everyone is going to be presenting just the one single IP to the real world (possibly three or four depending on the scale and routing of the network).

Does this mean there is sinister editing going on of Wikipedia by corporations? Or does it mean that some members of staff have an obsession? You'll never really know. You could surmise, but that is about it. It's a bit like banning the BBC IP from a blog for a nasty comment, you'd actually be banning more than one person. The edit list doesn't really mean much unless the edit itself is blatantly iffy.

Having said this, I did think it was amusing that someone apparently from CCHQ had been editing the entry about the Hellfire Club. Talk about reinforcing a stereotype!

Update: Iffy like this but even then, you couldn't say for sure if was auhtorised editing or the act of a sycophant.

Update II: I actually quite suck. I was sent a link to this scanner yesterday by Jag which is when I found the Hellfire Club thing but forgot to blog it. However, Wrinkled Weasel did, as the comments say, email me earlier about the BBC figures and it reminded me. In my haste between posting and work I didn't point that out, hence, I suck.