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

2025-12-09

AI Summary

IPv6 adoption and configuration practices remain poorly understood at global scale due to lack of long-term, fine-grained observational data. Method: Leveraging anonymized Wikimedia edit logs (2003–2024), this study introduces the first large-scale, publicly available IPv6 time-series dataset—comprising 19 million unique client IPv6 addresses—and applies integrated log parsing, IPv6 address pattern classification (EUI-64, SLAAC, DHCPv6), geolocation mapping, and multi-scale temporal statistics. Contribution/Results: (1) IPv6 adoption across language-specific Wikipedia communities exhibits pronounced heterogeneous growth; (2) EUI-64 remains prevalent on desktop clients but rapidly declines on mobile devices; (3) national and regional adoption rhythms and technical configurations (e.g., stateless vs. stateful addressing) differ significantly. This work provides the longest-duration, highest-granularity empirical evidence to date for informing IETF IPv6 addressing policy and configuration standardization.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: (Large) Language Models
• Computer Vision: Language and Vision

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Analyzing IPv6 address prevalence across countries and languages
• Tracking IPv6 adoption growth over two decades
• Assessing EUI-64 addressing usage on client devices

Innovation

• Extracted 19M IPv6 addresses from Wikimedia dumps
• Analyzed IPv6 adoption trends across countries and time
• Assessed EUI-64 addressing prevalence on client devices