user60194220 wrote:

The given Website ping.eu at the german wikipedia is not useable without ECMAScript/Javascript please fix that, maybe an solution would be whois.wikimedia.org which does that all for us, or randomly links to different whois services.

Changing to extension request.

Somewhat related from the admin tools backlog: "Integrate bits.wikimedia.org/geoiplookup into Admin Tools, e.g. CheckUser, so that users do not have to use a third party tool"

https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-php is a PHP library that allows reading from a maxmind database.

Noting here that fundraising has a few extensions still using the default PHP GeoIP library, which I see has been deprecated. We should be considering GeoIP2 as well.

We already have a Special page that exposes a user's IP address information, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version. It's just not very visible information given the HTML:

<!-- visited from 70.123.70.141 -->
<span style='display:none'>visited from 70.123.70.141</span>

That is irrelevant, as it only shows your own IP to you, and only shows the IP without any additional info.

What do you think this task is proposing? A whois service operated by Wikimedia Foundation Inc.? Or a Special page in a MediaWiki extension or in MediaWiki core that queries other whois services? Or some combination of the two?

It's not clear to me that we want to continue investing resources into a system that uses IP addresses as identifiers for users who are not logged in.

Would https://tools.wmflabs.org/whois be a good solution to the point about different sites being used as mentioned in the task description?

I think so.

But note that from the perspective of the task, that would be considered a workaround, not a solution.

Put another way: read the task as if you are running a non-WMF. Do you want to rely on an external WHOIS website (may it be the tools.wmflabs.org one, or any other one) or would you rather have an in-wiki WHOIS functionality? The task is arguing for the latter.

Whoops, I meant to say it was a workaround, not a solution, in my previous message, but yeah, I wouldn't expect a non WMF wiki to use an external site that they didn't choose.