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.

翻译：由于文章编辑政策，维基百科等维基媒体站点无意中成为了IPv6地址的时间胶囊。当维基媒体用户未登录账户进行编辑时，其IP地址将替代用户名使用。因此，维基媒体站点数据转储为研究人员提供了跨越二十余年的时间戳客户端IPv6地址，用以理解地址分配及其随时间和空间的变化规律。本研究从维基百科等维基媒体站点提取了2003年至2024年间编辑者使用的1900万个独立IPv6地址。通过分析这些地址，我们探究了IPv6在维基媒体站点对应语言国家的普及程度、IPv6采用率随时间增长的趋势，以及在台式机、笔记本电脑和移动电话等客户端设备上EUI-64寻址方式的普遍性。