Saturday, October 19, 2013

Famous Wikipedians: 69.120.111.23

The edit in question.
At 12:01 AM on June 25, 2007, the page of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit was edited by an anonymous user, known by his IP address 69.120.111.23. A line was added about Benoit not attending a match due to the death of his wife, Nancy. The edit was quickly reverted by an admin because there was no corroborating source, and a fact like that would definitely need a citation.

At 2:30 PM, police in Fayetteville, Georgia, discovered the bodies of Benoit, his wife, and son. Benoit had murdered his family before committing suicide. The odd thing was, this was 14 hours after the Wikipedia edit about the death of Nancy.

News outlets picked up the story about the mysterious pre-discovery edit. Was the edit from Benoit? Or from someone who knew about the murders before the police did? The Wikimedia Foundation contacted authorities in Georgia, and they began an investigation into these edits. Separately, a WWE fan with the username LucharesuFan619 noticed that the IP address of the precognitive user came from Stamford, Connecticut, home of the WWE.

As speculation about this editor swirled, 69.120.111.23 posted again, this time to the talk page of a Wikinews article early on June 29. He apologized for the controversy he caused:

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Hey everyone. I am here to talk about the wikipedia comment that was left by myself. I just want to say that it was an incredible coincidence. Last weekend, I had heard about Chris Benoit no showing Vengeance because of a family emergency, and I had heard rumors about why that was. I was reading rumors and speculation about this matter online, and one of them included that his wife may have passed away, and I did the wrong thing by posting it on wikipedia to spite there being no evidence. I posted my speculation on the situation at the time and I am deeply sorry about this, and I was just as shocked as everyone when I heard that this actually would happen in real life. It is one of those things that just turned into a huge coincidence.
You can read the full apology here.

This was not the end of the Benoit affair, however. Georgia police traced the IP address through Comcast and arrived at the home of a young man living in Stamford, CT (His identity can be found online, but Wikirama's not going to post it here, just because the guy has probably been through enough already). After seizing some of his computer equipment and interviewing the man, police determined he had no knowledge of the crime but was just responding to online rumors in WWE forums. In fact, there were other edits to Wikipedia about Nancy Benoit's death before the bodies were discovered, and much earlier postings on the WWE forums. 69.120.111.23 just happened to be the first to edit the page.

It's not often that vandalism and silly edits lead to real-life consequences. But with Wikipedia, a site that keeps track of every edit and is one of the most popular sites in the world, even a coincidental change like the Benoit one can earn worldwide attention. According to a according to a book on the murders, a detective confronted the young editor that the police knew about previous vandalism by him against Wikipedia pages. "You can turn yourself from a prank to a murder suspect," the detective warned. As the user contributions for 69.120.111.23 show, he has not posted again in six years. More than likely he changed his IP address, but he's not going to be making the same mistakes again.

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