The reason I'm concerned is that we already use geonotices quite heavily and will probably use them even more in the future. While there is no financial cost to the geonotices (obviously) there is an opportunity cost and a cost in terms of the attention they require - we should bear this in mind. I am a bit concerned that we will end up suffering from "advertising blindness" as people start to tune them out, which is more likely to occur if they see notices they don't find relevant. 

So I suggest we should have geonotices based on regional areas within the UK wherever we can, and only use UK-wide geonotices for things which are really of interest to Wikipedians nationwide - in which I would count a Cambridge University collaboration but not a Cambridge meetup, for instance. (Or indeed a British Library collaboration, but not a London meetup!)

I don't know the details of the geolocation database we use, but the one Google uses claims it can locate 62% of British IPs to within 25 miles of the actual location: http://www.maxmind.com/app/city_accuracy - even if the true figure is only 50% that's still very good for our purposes.

Chris

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:16 PM, Richard Farmbrough <richard@farmbrough.co.uk> wrote:
Depends on the ISP, and, moreover, it depends on the granularity of  information they provide.  Most ADSL ISPs seem to enjoy churning IP addresses every 24 hours (possibly small hours resets of their exchange equipment).  Many geo-attempts I've seem simply use ISP's  registered addresses (hence eveyone lived in Woking, at one point).  Smart reading of the traceroute will often give almost street level location but I doubt many people do that.  I know little about geo-targeting,  but it is something I need ot find out about, so any useful resoruces....


On 16/05/2011 14:52, Deryck Chan wrote:

Chris,
Currently geo-targeting is only accurate to country level (due to ISPs randomly moving IPs around within a country - Magnus, is that correct?), so the only surefire way of targeting all of Cambridge is to scoop up all of the UK, unfortunately.
Deryck

On May 16, 2011 2:05 PM, "Chris Keating" <chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can I suggest some rather tighter geotargeting for that notice - at the
> moment it appears to aim at every Wikipedian in a box with Belfast and
> Calais as its opposite corners....
>
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Michael Peel <michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk
>> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 16 May 2011, at 08:48, Charles Matthews wrote:
>>
>> > On 09/05/2011 11:05, I wrote:
>> >> I have posted a page for the next Cambridge meetup:
>> >>
>> >> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Cambridge/11
>> >
>> > A site notice for this event would be helpful.
>>
>> I've set up an en.wp geonotice for it (which appears at the top of
>> watchlists). In general, the place to request these is at:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice
>> and any admin can make them live, by editing the page at:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Geonotice.js
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mike
>>
>>
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>> wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org
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>>

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