How to collect IP addresses of Wikipedia edits

Processing aggregate results of geocoded IP addresses can provide valuable insights. This is very common for server logs and can also be used in many other situations. Many websites include the IP address of contributors of content. Wikipedia provides a history of changes on all of their pages. Edits created by someone that is not a registered user of Wikipedia have their IP address published in the history. We will examine how to create a scraper that will navigate the history of a given Wikipedia topic and collect the IP addresses of unregistered edits.

Getting ready

We will examine the edits made to the Web scraping page in Wikipedia. This page is available at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping. The following shows a small part of this page:

The view history tab

Note View history in the upper-right. Clicking on that link gives you access to the history for the edits:

Inspecting an IP address

I've scrolled this down a little bit to highlight...