An issue for local meetups is notifying users not signed up or checking their watchlists. Adding city level geo-targeting means we can be more effective in our reach.
WM-NYC serves 20 million people within 2 hours of travel (60 miles/100 km) and regularly has meetups. National level notices are inappropriate and outside the chapter's scope. The last time one was run (Wikipedia 10 birthday), the response was 5-10x. Most new attendees are the result of flyers and not website interaction.
The geoip cookie already records the city (And a lat/long), so the data is already there
The cookie format is: COUNTRY CODE:PROVINCE/STATE CODE:CITY:LATITUDE:LONGITUDE:[Don't know what the last field is]
Edit: The last field seems to be v4. I thought it was IP version but its v4 even for IPv6. I have no idea what this field represents.
Do we know how accurate the data is for different countries? What level of
false positives would we be looking at?
Seddon
I have no idea. I believe it comes from the MaxMind database. I know that Province/State and city field is often not filled out in some countries. And there seems to be some encoding issues with non-ascii letters. I would expect it to be fairly accurate for IPv4 in a major US city (such as New York). Its probably not all that accurate for Africa.
I'm not actually sure if it comes from the MaxMind db, and if so what db, but if it does - https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-database-accuracy gives some accuracy numbers. Although that's averages per country, I imagine major urban centers are much more accurate than rural places.
At the October AfroCROWD I asked how people learned of the meetup. Most saw a flyer in the library. Clearly the general public did not see the watchlist notice.