Wikipedia blocks 26 million users from the UK's largest mobile network operator | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia blocks 26 million users from the UK's largest mobile network operator

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13 pointseeblockage16 comments

It looks like they're blocked from editing wikipedia articles without an account or am I misunderstanding wikipedia's response?

Blocking anonymous editing from a range of IPs to combat malicious editing seems ok in my book since they allow alternative means.

That's how I read it as well, which would mean the headline above is very clickbaity.

Yamla: "You can, however, still edit while logged in with an account."

The problem is that all EE users are both blocked from editing and from directly creating an account.

But they link a process to create an account which I assume is to combat automation.

Yes but then you have to wait in a queue for someone to create the account for you. That is, if they don't deny that too. Also they require your email address for this process.

It's just more and more barriers when all you want to do is quickly correct some information in an article you read. Very frustrating and counterproductive!

So if you're on the go, and you're the type of person who wants to edit wikipedia, you'll be prompted to log in. If you don't have an account you would need to create one which probably involves waiting 'til you're back at home or the office. That's ... not that bad, I imagine they didn't do it randomly but because they had a wave of bad-faith edits from EE users.

There are over 26 million EE users. Some of them are going to go to Wikipedia and make malicious edits because some people are just like that. But punishing everyone else for it seems like overkill to me.

I imagine it takes quite a few for Wikipedia to decide to block them outright ...

But they're not blocked from editing — they just need to be logged in. Wikipedia users can use their existing account. New users were given a human-reviewed path for directly creating an account, apparently out of necessity.

Though it sounds like the normal automated account creation flow is also blocked from that ISP. That could be more problematic and discourage editor account creation.

I thought they were blocked from viewing Wikipedia and this article title was created by the HN user.

It's clickbait and the user created his account only 30 mins ago just to post this.

Mobile wikipedia editors annoy me. They tend to make mis-spelled edits (it's hard to edit on a mobile, and predictive text also screws things up). And it seems to me that mobile editors tend not to bother with an edit summary.

Adding 1,500 characters to an article with no edit summary pisses me off. Especially if the additions are sprinkled all over the article. And especially especially, if the edit also involves removing material.

I often see edit summaries of the form "I added information". These often seem to be vandalism. I don't think any developer would add a commit with a message starting with "I ...". If I see such an edit summary, I usually take a closer look.

Clickbait title. Can still edit from an account. Only anonymous edits are blocked.

Creating accounts is blocked too, if you don't have one and you want to make an edit, you have to go through some manual appeal process to request someone creates an account for you.

> so I'd have to walk to my local library, almost a mile away, to make an edit

Or you'd walk there, set up an account once and edit away to your heart's content.

How else should vandals, spammers, etc. be dealt with when their ISP lets them hop at will throughout its entire IP space?

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