WikIPedia: Unearthing a 20-Year History of IPv6 Client Addressing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rye, Erik, Levin, Dave
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Rye, Erik
Levin, Dave
author_facet Rye, Erik
Levin, Dave
contents Due to their article editing policies, Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia have become inadvertent time capsules for IPv6 addresses. When Wikimedia users make edits without signing into an account, their IP addresses are used in lieu of a username. Wikimedia site dumps therefore provide researchers with over two decades worth of timestamped client IPv6 addresses to understand address assignments and how they have changed over time and space. In this work, we extract 19M unique IPv6 addresses from Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia that were used by editors from 2003 to 2024. We use these addresses to understand the prevalence of IPv6 in countries corresponding to Wikimedia site languages, how IPv6 adoption has grown over time, and the prevalence of EUI-64 addressing on client devices like desktops, laptops, and mobile phones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08808
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WikIPedia: Unearthing a 20-Year History of IPv6 Client Addressing
Rye, Erik
Levin, Dave
Networking and Internet Architecture
Social and Information Networks
Due to their article editing policies, Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia have become inadvertent time capsules for IPv6 addresses. When Wikimedia users make edits without signing into an account, their IP addresses are used in lieu of a username. Wikimedia site dumps therefore provide researchers with over two decades worth of timestamped client IPv6 addresses to understand address assignments and how they have changed over time and space. In this work, we extract 19M unique IPv6 addresses from Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia that were used by editors from 2003 to 2024. We use these addresses to understand the prevalence of IPv6 in countries corresponding to Wikimedia site languages, how IPv6 adoption has grown over time, and the prevalence of EUI-64 addressing on client devices like desktops, laptops, and mobile phones.
title WikIPedia: Unearthing a 20-Year History of IPv6 Client Addressing
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08808