Wiki: too many requests error

General talk
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I’ve been getting an HTTP 429 Too Many Requests error in the wiki since this morning whenever I click on View History or View Source, but I used the wiki very little today and yesterday. This happens on different machines, using different browsers, being logged in or not. Am I the only one experiencing this?

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see Talk:Wiki - OpenStreetMap Wiki

I have temporarily disabled access to the wiki diff views due to extreme bot/scraper activity.

– Firefishy

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I also get this error when trying to search for anything on the wiki, e.g. on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?search=sidewalk&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go

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I’m getting this error when accessing https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php for any reason, but not when accessing https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/api.php or https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/. Practically speaking, this also blocks editing the wiki, but curiously I do see some edits still coming into Special:RecentChanges, suggesting that some users are able to access index.php.

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I was able to make an edit just now using the mobile view. You can even use the mobile view in a desktop browser, if you figure out how to turn it on without visiting index.php.

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They are enabled again (and now you need to be logged in in order to view them): Talk:Wiki - OpenStreetMap Wiki

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It would be desirable if, in a similar scenario in the future, an ordinary user performing a standard wiki search didn’t encounter such an alarming message—“Too Many Requests – The user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time”—which makes one worry that their IP address has been blacklisted or something similar. That is certainly what happened to me today, leading to a lengthy investigation before I finally stumbled upon the wiki talk page and this forum post. Perhaps a more neutral message could be displayed instead—such as stating that a service has been temporarily taken offline due to high load, or using similar wording that is better than the current version.

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The blocking of login was an unexpected side effect. I wasn’t expecting many real humans to see the error. The wiki was unusable due to the rate of scraping/crawling by anonymous AI bots.

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I understand the process. However, I didn’t experience it as a login block; I accessed the wiki homepage (without any problems), wanted to perform a search, and then landed on the message page (no login) . The text there could be optimized because of this side effect, which is why I mentioned it; I hope that’s clear. Or perhaps there are other solutions, or the side effect can be avoided altogether—I don’t know. In any case, there might be room for improvement.