[17:56:10] Hi [17:56:28] hi [17:56:48] hi [17:56:57] Cool, I didn't think there was anyone here. [17:57:57] Why is it so hard to register on Wikipedia? I had to write a support email... [17:58:19] What does that mean? [17:59:01] All IP addresses are blocked [18:00:04] What is this protection against anyway? Vandals who ruin articles or people trying to gain publicity on Wikipedia? [18:00:06] Do you have a better idea how to deal with aggressive bots which bring the website down for everyone? [18:00:25] See https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/ for more info [18:02:36] That's understandable, but is the problem that bots make mistakes in articles, are they advertising this, or is the problem simply that people themselves should be doing the editing? [18:02:58] The problem is LLMs (so-called "AI"). This is not about editing at all. [18:03:50] Well, LLM is used not only on Wikipedia =) [18:04:09] I don't see how the use of LLM is related to this conversation. [18:04:32] (it's about how the material to train the LLMs is gathered) [18:04:33] This is about crawlers trying to get text input for their LLM. This is not about LLMs writing some text on Wikipedia. [18:04:53] Please see the link that I shared, and the followup post linked at its bottom. [18:06:34] Oh, sorry for my inattention =( So they are overloading the site... [18:06:39] basically yes [18:07:25] Well, what about two-factor authentication or the same authorization via email? [18:08:10] How is that related to accessing the website? [18:09:25] Ah, I see. Well then, it's Cloudflare's captcha. [18:11:23] We don't use Cloudflare for Wikipedia, not sure I can follow, sorry :-/ [18:15:26] https://runtimerebel.com/blog/bot-mitigation-with-captchas-understanding-cloudflare-turnstile [18:17:28] Limitor: I do not think anyone wants to deal with CAPTCHAs in order to read Wikipedia. Plus they might not be free and open source software anyway. [18:18:28] See the blog post that I linked above, which describes the situation and some countermeasures. [18:19:49] There are many open-source captchas, such as mCaptcha, ALTCHA, and P-Captcha. [18:20:42] Limitor: Sure. And they do not solve the problem. [18:20:58] andre: I don't understand how that blog post is relevant for signing up new accounts? [18:21:42] The original statement here was "All IP addresses are blocked". And dealing with traffic may include also some IP blocks. [18:22:05] But hard to say exactly without an exact error message that folks received when trying to register on Wikipedia. [18:22:13] the original statement was "Why is it so hard to register on Wikipedia?" [18:22:30] Yepp. And the second statement was 'All IP addresses are blocked" [18:23:28] but could also be a community decision on a specific wiki to block an IP range. Again: Hard to know the exact reasons without more information. [18:23:37] HiNow we're thinking about an alternative to blocking IP addresses:) [18:23:59] Limitor: it would be helpful if you stated what your problem is [18:24:55] Limitor, you do. We don't. :D [18:25:15] I don't remember the exact message, but it sounded like this: Your IP address is blocked by Qbit-Array. And this is some kind of bot on Wikipedia [18:25:57] but browsing/reading works fine? [18:26:20] Limitor, which exact website is this about? [18:26:46] Yes [18:27:21] About Wikipedia. I found it difficult to register [18:27:48] Limitor, there are 300 WIkipedias. [18:27:59] one for each language. [18:28:27] That is, there is a captcha during registration, but it could be used simply to enter the site [18:29:52] For English, Russian and French [18:30:12] One mistake everywhere [18:33:23] Am I not distracting you too much? Is this a channel just for communication or for help?