Post by Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz

At Wikipedia, we now block over 2 billion bot visits PER DAY. The infrastructure hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events. However, the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing hosting costs and risks to Wikipedia and our model, including Wikipedia's availability to our readers. We ensure fair usage by prioritising access for our readers, content and technical contributors, blocking abusive traffic, and requiring companies seeking access to our data at scale to use our Wikimedia Enterprise services, designed for high-volume use cases, instead of scraping pages or overusing community resources. Our content is free, our infrastructure is not. Support Wikipedia!