Yes it would be easy to couple user names in a sparsely edited wiki to geo info (or for that matter the name of a very active editor on a very busy wiki).

So the point is that geo info should be inherently vague. As MaxMInd only has city names for places with 100's of thousands if not millions inhabitants that is not a give-away. Likewise with rounded lat/long.

Erik

From: analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Adam Hyland
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 7:06 PM
To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.
Subject: Re: [Analytics] U.S. state-level editor retention data

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding but wouldn't a set up like this (even anonimized as described above) allow someone to recover the location of an individual editor on sparsely edited wiki's?

If we're just looking to provide a convenient lookup for IP editors what is the advantage of doing this over requiring researchers to use publicly available IP databases to perform geolocation?

Adam Hyland

Developer at Bocoup
Web: http://shift command awesome.com

On Aug 12, 2013 12:46 PM, "Erik Zachte" <ezachte@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Some thought on this:

We have been discussing adding new geo data for a long time.

I lost track of current status and latest decisions but FWIW a year ago this was the idea for squid log:

We thought of replacing ip address by a composite field (using a different delimiter than the field delimiter).

The field could look like this:

4|hash code|CL||Santiago|-33.5,-70.5

6|hash code|US|CA|San Francisco|-37.5,122.5

Where 4 or 6 is the #triplets in ip address.

Hash code is anonimized ip address.

Country code as used by MaxMind ( http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/codes/iso3166/ )

Region/state when available or else empty string (*)

City name when available or else empty string ( http://www.maxmind.com/GeoIPCity-534-Location.csv )

Lastly follow latitude/longitude, rounded on purpose. This gives resolution of at best 55 km or 30 mi resolution, depending on latitude, to ensure anonimization particularly for edits. Otherwise a very active editor in a sparsely populated region of say China could easily be matched with edit timestamps from dumps.

* Caveat:

Supplying region code requires 'external lookup' as MaxMind puts it. ( http://www.maxmind.com/en/city )

This is probably a costly operation.

Erik

From: analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Hare
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2013 1:55 PM
To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.
Subject: Re: [Analytics] U.S. state-level editor retention data

That will work. Cheers!

On Aug 10, 2013, at 9:21 AM, Toby Negrin wrote:

Hi James,

We can take a look at this -- the next step for WikiMetrics is to expand the reporting capabilities. The developer with the most context is out until Wednesday; we should be able to get back to you by the end of the week with an estimate of how difficult it would be to implement this changes.

Will that work?

-Toby

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 4:07 AM, Wikimedia DC <james.hare@wikidc.org> wrote:

Greetings,

I am James Hare, president of the Washington, DC chapter. At Wikimania I have been learning about the editor retention data the Wikimedia Foundation has been collecting and analyzing. I was discussing it with Ryan Kaldari and he noted that while the data was available at the national level, it was not yet available at the state level.

How difficult would it be to implement state-level analysis? Would it just be a matter of simply changing the geolocation lookup code, or would it be a very expensive change that would benefit relatively few people? For Wikimedia DC's sake I am interested in data for the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia (our defined chapter region).

Regards,
James Hare
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