I have posted a page for the next Cambridge meetup:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Cambridge/11
It is on meta by request (more sisterly). The page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Cambridge_11 also exists but the intention is for people to sign up on the other page. Apparently the Cockneys don't get confused by this, and I shall attempt to check the meta page frequently.
Charles
On 09/05/2011 11:05, I wrote:
I have posted a page for the next Cambridge meetup:
A site notice for this event would be helpful.
Charles
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:
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
On 16/05/2011 08:55, Michael Peel 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:
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 - I didn't know there was a DIY route.
Charles
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:
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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
I have implemented my own suggestion and restricted the notice to a box more defined by Lincoln and Southend - I hope that is OK with people, I'm just a bit conscious that watchlist notices are quite intrusive and we should be careful not to tell the whole of the UK about every event happening in the whole country.
I've also tweeted about it: http://twitter.com/#!/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048
There is a good match between the profile of Wikimedians and that of Tweeters, so Twitter is a very useful tool for us as an organisation. If there's ever anything that we can usefully tweet about please feel free to email me, or do a reply to @wikimediauk.
Thanks,
Chris
On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.comwrote:
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:
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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
On 16/05/2011 14:39, Chris Keating wrote:
I have implemented my own suggestion and restricted the notice to a box more defined by Lincoln and Southend - I hope that is OK with people, I'm just a bit conscious that watchlist notices are quite intrusive and we should be careful not to tell the whole of the UK about every event happening in the whole country.
I'm actually a bit concerned about this approach. What other major channel is there for me to publicise a meetup? And are you justified in assuming meetups are only of interest "locally!? At the recent London meetup I met a Wikipedian who lives in Lancashire.
I've also tweeted about it: http://twitter.com/#!/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048 http://twitter.com/#%21/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048
There is a good match between the profile of Wikimedians and that of Tweeters, so Twitter is a very useful tool for us as an organisation. If there's ever anything that we can usefully tweet about please feel free to email me, or do a reply to @wikimediauk.
Well, I would say that the profile of those who actually come to meetups is a bit more middle-aged than that.
On the general situation: there are few meetups outside London in a year. Meetups are a way of drawing those who "only" edit into other things. I'd like to see WMUK give the running of more meetups maximum support.
Charles
On Tue, 17 May 2011, Charles Matthews wrote:
On the general situation: there are few meetups outside London in a year. Meetups are a way of drawing those who "only" edit into other things. I'd like to see WMUK give the running of more meetups maximum support.
I'm fully in agreement with this. I wont be able to make the Cambridge meetup due to deadlines (I couldn't make one anywhere in the country), but I think we should be aiming for at least 6 non-London meetups in a year (one every other month). Particularly some that are not within commuting distance of London - not to disadvantage those of us based in the capital, but to advantage those who are not.
---- Chris McKenna
cmckenna@sucs.org www.sucs.org/~cmckenna
The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart
Antoine de Saint Exupery
Just to note: WMUK doesn't own the geonotices; any admin can change them in the usual Wiki fashion. ;-)
Also: to be honest, it's a little difficult to see how WMUK can give much support to meetups. They're volunteer-led, advertised on-wiki, and don't really need anything to support them to make them successful as far as I can see. The London wikimeets have never asked for anything from WMUK (despite me prompting them to occasionally ;-) ). There are things WMUK could provide: for example, room hire (but most wikimeets are in a pub or cafe, without room hire costs), transportation costs for a speaker (but most wikimeets don't have speakers), internet access costs (but I know the London wikimeet pointedly avoids having internet access) or Wikipedia posters (not too useful in a pub, though?). I'd love to see us supporting the establishment of many more wikimeets, but we need some input in to how we could usefully do that.
Thanks, Mike
On 17 May 2011, at 09:26, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 16/05/2011 14:39, Chris Keating wrote:
I have implemented my own suggestion and restricted the notice to a box more defined by Lincoln and Southend - I hope that is OK with people, I'm just a bit conscious that watchlist notices are quite intrusive and we should be careful not to tell the whole of the UK about every event happening in the whole country.
I'm actually a bit concerned about this approach. What other major channel is there for me to publicise a meetup? And are you justified in assuming meetups are only of interest "locally!? At the recent London meetup I met a Wikipedian who lives in Lancashire.
I've also tweeted about it: http://twitter.com/#!/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048 http://twitter.com/#%21/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048
There is a good match between the profile of Wikimedians and that of Tweeters, so Twitter is a very useful tool for us as an organisation. If there's ever anything that we can usefully tweet about please feel free to email me, or do a reply to @wikimediauk.
Well, I would say that the profile of those who actually come to meetups is a bit more middle-aged than that.
On the general situation: there are few meetups outside London in a year. Meetups are a way of drawing those who "only" edit into other things. I'd like to see WMUK give the running of more meetups maximum support.
Charles
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
On 17/05/2011 09:40, Michael Peel wrote:
Just to note: WMUK doesn't own the geonotices; any admin can change them in the usual Wiki fashion. ;-)
Also: to be honest, it's a little difficult to see how WMUK can give much support to meetups. They're volunteer-led, advertised on-wiki, and don't really need anything to support them to make them successful as far as I can see. The London wikimeets have never asked for anything from WMUK (despite me prompting them to occasionally ;-) ). There are things WMUK could provide: for example, room hire (but most wikimeets are in a pub or cafe, without room hire costs), transportation costs for a speaker (but most wikimeets don't have speakers), internet access costs (but I know the London wikimeet pointedly avoids having internet access) or Wikipedia posters (not too useful in a pub, though?). I'd love to see us supporting the establishment of many more wikimeets, but we need some input in to how we could usefully do that.
Advance publicity and reporting are of course the basics. But if you look around the world, or listen to participants, there is the chance of tying meetups into other things (e.g. photography initiatives ...) to have some variety and purpose.
Charles
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 17/05/2011 09:40, Michael Peel wrote:
Just to note: WMUK doesn't own the geonotices; any admin can change them
in the usual Wiki fashion. ;-)
Also: to be honest, it's a little difficult to see how WMUK can give much
support to meetups. They're volunteer-led, advertised on-wiki, and don't really need anything to support them to make them successful as far as I can see. The London wikimeets have never asked for anything from WMUK (despite me prompting them to occasionally ;-) ). There are things WMUK could provide: for example, room hire (but most wikimeets are in a pub or cafe, without room hire costs), transportation costs for a speaker (but most wikimeets don't have speakers), internet access costs (but I know the London wikimeet pointedly avoids having internet access) or Wikipedia posters (not too useful in a pub, though?). I'd love to see us supporting the establishment of many more wikimeets, but we need some input in to how we could usefully do that. Advance publicity and reporting are of course the basics. But if you look around the world, or listen to participants, there is the chance of tying meetups into other things (e.g. photography initiatives ...) to have some variety and purpose.
In DC, we usually have an early afternoon activity before the Meetup at a resturaunt early evening, before some people retreat to a bar for Drinks (we don't really have the pub atmosphere in the states). For example, last Summer, we had one meetup where we did a guided tour of the Air and Space Museum, talked to some GLAM people about a collaboration, and then went to a Pizza joint to hang out and chat. Another recent one, included a photo scavenger hunt in the morning, a meeting at a library discussing the structure of the chapter and then a trip to a resteraunt. Almost all of these events had some users leaving and arriving part way through. I know New York does similar structure for events. It seems have something exclusive tied into the meetup (such as a tour or event) sometimes draws more people.
Alex Stinson
On 17 May 2011, at 12:05, Alex Stinson wrote:
On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote: Advance publicity and reporting are of course the basics. But if you look around the world, or listen to participants, there is the chance of tying meetups into other things (e.g. photography initiatives ...) to have some variety and purpose.
In DC, we usually have an early afternoon activity before the Meetup at a resturaunt early evening, before some people retreat to a bar for Drinks (we don't really have the pub atmosphere in the states). For example, last Summer, we had one meetup where we did a guided tour of the Air and Space Museum, talked to some GLAM people about a collaboration, and then went to a Pizza joint to hang out and chat. Another recent one, included a photo scavenger hunt in the morning, a meeting at a library discussing the structure of the chapter and then a trip to a resteraunt. Almost all of these events had some users leaving and arriving part way through. I know New York does similar structure for events. It seems have something exclusive tied into the meetup (such as a tour or event) sometimes draws more people.
Interesting; thanks for sharing these insights. This is rather different from how wikimeets have been run in the UK thus far. Given that events like this are happening, perhaps we should explicitly brand the social meetings that happen around them as meetups? E.g. after the British Library event in January we ended up in the pub for general discussions, but that wasn't advertised beyond a mention on the event page...
Thanks, Mike
On 17 May 2011 09:40, Michael Peel michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
internet access costs (but I know the London wikimeet pointedly avoids having internet access)
Pretty much all Weatherspoons have free WiFi, it's just that the one we go to in London has very poor free WiFi and we often can't get it to work. That's not intentional.
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:
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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
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 mailto: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 mailto: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:
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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org mailto:wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
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.
http://www.maxmind.com/app/city_accuracyChris
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:
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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia UK mailing listwikimediauk-l@wikimedia.orghttp://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
I would echo the concerns about Geonotices as I've started to click the X to get rid of them as soon as they come up.
Also - although I live in Somerset my ISP (plusnet) is based in Sheffield so would I receive notices about meetups in Yorkshire, but miss out on those in Bristol or Taunton (not that we have done one there yet)?
Rod
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chris Keating Sent: 16 May 2011 19:53 To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Cambridge meetup 21 May
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:
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
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
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In article 4DD16A1B.6050309@googlemail.com, 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 believe "often" here means "for Virgin Media cable users".
The way VM's network is set up means it's easy to locate users to (roughly) city level, and often better if you can work out the subdivisions they use within those areas.
For ADSL users, it makes no sense to assign IP addresses or do routing based on the user's physical location, because all traffic has to go through BT (or another wholesale provider) in London anyway, and the route it takes after it gets to BT is not visible in traceroute. So, when the user connects the ISP just assigns the first available IP with no regard to location.
It's possible that there is an ADSL ISP that still assigns IPs based on physical location, but I've never seen one.
I'm fairly certain (and I've said this before) that for this reason it's impossible to do city-level geolocation of UK users in any useful way.
Even worse, MaxMind (the service Wikimedia uses) tries to "guess" the location of ADSL users, and usually fails. For example, when I used Andrews & Arnold as my ISP, MaxMind decided I lived in Arnold, Notts. There was no indication that this location was guessed or might be inaccurate, so it's not even possible to fall back to UK-wide geolocation for ADSL users.
- river.
Indeed "often" does mean that, pretty much, however my knowledge of Virgin Media's infrastructure is limited to the half of it that was Telewest, and even there is not great. ADSL is indeed a different kettle of fish, often hitting a BT DSLAM (IIRC) at the exchange then performing some kind of LDAP or other directory lookup, to determine the provider, then piping the ATM level call to the providers network as the next (first outside the CP) hop in IP terms. However the big providers increasingly have their own equipment in the exchange, making this model obsolete, and most of the small provders piggy-back big ones. Anyway I am not a network engineer (although sometimes my ISP thinks I am) so that's all a bit vague and don't quote me on it etc...
Doubtless Google, if they wished, could fish a unique ID from your browser fingerprint and a postcode from your use of Google maps and pinpoint you exactly.
On 17/05/2011 10:31, River Tarnell wrote:
In article4DD16A1B.6050309@googlemail.com, Richard Farmbroughrichard@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 believe "often" here means "for Virgin Media cable users".
The way VM's network is set up means it's easy to locate users to (roughly) city level, and often better if you can work out the subdivisions they use within those areas.
For ADSL users, it makes no sense to assign IP addresses or do routing based on the user's physical location, because all traffic has to go through BT (or another wholesale provider) in London anyway, and the route it takes after it gets to BT is not visible in traceroute. So, when the user connects the ISP just assigns the first available IP with no regard to location.
It's possible that there is an ADSL ISP that still assigns IPs based on physical location, but I've never seen one.
I'm fairly certain (and I've said this before) that for this reason it's impossible to do city-level geolocation of UK users in any useful way.
Even worse, MaxMind (the service Wikimedia uses) tries to "guess" the location of ADSL users, and usually fails. For example, when I used Andrews& Arnold as my ISP, MaxMind decided I lived in Arnold, Notts. There was no indication that this location was guessed or might be inaccurate, so it's not even possible to fall back to UK-wide geolocation for ADSL users.
- river.
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
On 16/05/2011 19:16, Richard Farmbrough 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....
And I have just ordered BT Infinity. Will I be more obvious, or will my location remain fuzzy?
Gordo
This is definitely something we need to start thinking about. Thus far, whenever I've posted geonotices I've gone for a large area as there haven't been many events happening in the UK - sufficiently few that I believe some wikimedians will deem it worthwhile traveling a long way for them (e.g. I've attended London wikimeets, even though I'm based in Manchester - although I'm a special case as I'd probably continue doing that regardless ;-) ). With more events, then it does start becoming impractical to advertise them all so widely.
An alternative option to narrowing the geographical range, which particularly interesting if geonotices aren't that specific in location, is to do a summary geonotice, e.g.:
"Meetups this month: London on 8 May, Cambridge on 21 May, online on IRC on 3 and 17 May. More wikimeets and events are listed at [[:wmuk:Events]]. No wikimeets near you? Organise one!"
... this would have to lead to less spontaneous wikimeets, though, requiring about a month's planning - for comparison, the Cambridge meetup planning started on 7 May for an event on 21 May...
Thanks, Mike
On 16 May 2011, at 14:05, Chris Keating 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:
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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