Could it be that the geo IP matching is not accurate for Africa?
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	• ezachte
	Feb 20 2015, 5:40 PM

Description

reported by Kasper Souren

quote from mail

"In October I was a week in [country X] and in December I spent time in [country Y]. The report says there have been respectively [xx] and [yy] edits, but I even just on my own I did more edits on just the French Wikipedia.
[..]
Could it be that the geo IP matching is not accurate for Africa?"

User then was asked specific topics where he still remembers edits came from Africa. We received some examples.

We can therefore scan data files for these edits and see which ip addresses were used.

Event Timeline

• ezachte created this task.Feb 20 2015, 5:40 PM

• ezachte claimed this task.

• ezachte raised the priority of this task from to Medium.

• ezachte updated the task description. (Show Details)

• ezachte subscribed.

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptFeb 20 2015, 5:40 PM

Is this in Analytics ?

• ezachte added a project: Analytics.Feb 25 2015, 3:11 PM

• ezachte set Security to None.

• ezachte added a subscriber: Ijon.Mar 2 2015, 10:34 PM

Affirmative. The problem seems much wider than ip->geo for some African countries.

For https: the originating ip address is in the referer field, not in the ip-address field, the latter points to a WMF server..
As a result it seems all secure traffic is misattributed to the country where the WMF server is placed, at least for edits.

Milimetric moved this task from Incoming to Event Platform on the Analytics board.Dec 7 2015, 6:49 PM

• Nuria moved this task from Event Platform to Wikistats on the Analytics board.Aug 15 2016, 3:49 PM

• Nuria moved this task from Wikistats to Deprioritized on the Analytics board.

Removing assignee @ezachte as that Phabricator account has been deactivated. (If there are questions, it seems that @erik_zachte could be contacted.)

Is this still an ongoing issue? Is this something to keep in mind for project GLOW when we begin evaluating Nigeria specific data?

I propose resolving this task, since we have not had any more reports of inaccuracies since 2015 and we have also upgraded to newer versions of the MaxMind databases for geolocation.
@Iflorez is that OK with you? Are you aware of any weirdness in geolocating African coutries lately, which would support keeping the ticket open?

JArguello-WMF closed this task as Declined.Jul 4 2022, 6:13 PM

Could it be that the geo IP matching is not accurate for Africa?Closed, DeclinedPublicActions

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Could it be that the geo IP matching is not accurate for Africa?
Closed, DeclinedPublic
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