WikIPedia: Unearthing a 20-Year History of IPv6 Client Addressing
Erik Rye, Dave Levin
TL;DR
This paper treats Wikimedia dumps as a historical amber of client IPv6 addressing, extracting nearly 19 million unique IPv6 addresses from 2003–2024 across 1,005 Wikimedia sites. It analyzes adoption by language regions, growth over time, AS-level contributions, and EUI-64 usage, revealing that World IPv6 Launch in 2012 markedly accelerated IPv6 adoption while many addresses have short lifetimes. The authors show that AS-level deployments correlate with surges in IPv6 activity, document a resurgence of EUI-64 addresses driven by privacy-preserving MAC practices, and demonstrate that Wikimedia data provides unique historical context relative to active-hitlists like the IPv6 Hitlist. While offering valuable longitudinal insights, the study also notes biases due to regional access, user behavior, and representativeness of the IPv6 space. Overall, the Wikimedia IPv6 corpus serves as a complementary, historically rich resource for understanding IPv6 deployment and privacy implications over two decades.
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.