Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Trouble Creating a Wikipedia Account

I was curious. I don't know why I need a Wikipedia account, but when I tried to create one I got this:


What do you make of this? Can you explain it to me? Is there a way around it?

I am not sure why you need a Wikipedia account either. I have used Wikipedia for years and contribute to it financially at least annually and I do not have, nor have I ever had an account with them. Where/how are you getting to this? I am not seeing the option on the wikipedia.org home page. Are you sure you are on the "real" Wikipedia.org site and not a spoof?

As to the message, I presume Wikipedia is using one of the many spam prevention packages on the internet. Most of these packages work by monitoring traffic targeted to a website and using specific algorithms to identify spam by content, by message volume, by known suspicious IP locations such as China and the former Soviet Union, or all of the above. When a large volume of malicious traffic is identified as originating from a given IP address within a given time period that IP address is flagged and the subscribing sites typically reject traffic from that IP. The block will last anywhere from a few hours to several days depending on the rules established by the Spam blocker, the site itself, the persistence of the malware attack, etc. I do a lot of work with churches and I know of several whose IP address has been blocked for no other reason than they sent "too many" emails to "too many" addresses in a given span of time, which is why most now use commercial emailing systems such as Constant Contact for sending newsletters, bulletins, etc. This used to be a pretty common occurrence, but the algorithms and other factors have gotten a lot more sophisticated and I have not run into it myself for a few years now.

What can you do about it…

1. Wait and try again later. Hopefully the block will have expired.
2. Contact your ISP and make them aware of the block. They have a vested interest in not being blocked and will usually take prompt action to get it lifted. In some cases that may mean shuttting down specific users that can be identified as the source of the malware.
3. Change ISPs.
4. If you can identify the source of the blacklist you or your attorney can contact them directly and if you can prove you are not the source of the malware they may lift the block. However in the cases I have run into this the block expires before the IP can be removed from the list.

The message means what it says. Your IP address has been banned from creating a Wikipedia account.

This will happen if someone used your IP address to vandalize Wikipedia. If a person vandalizes Wikipedia from many different IP addresses in the same block, Wikipedia will sometimes ban the entire block. (In fact, Wikipedia has at times been known to ban entire towns from editing. For example, in 2007 Wikipedia banned the entire town of Traverse Mountain, Utah, in order to prevent one person from posting on the site. They have also banned an entire town in Scotland to prevent one other person from posting.)