Policy:User-Agent policy

From Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki

As of February 15, 2010, Wikimedia sites require aheader for all requests. This was an operative decision made by the technical staff and was announced and discussed on the technical mailing list. The rationale is, that clients that do not send a User-Agent string are mostly ill behaved scripts that cause a lot of load on the servers, without benefiting the projects. User-Agent strings that begin with non-descriptive default ).

Requests (e.g. from browsers or scripts) that do not send a descriptive User-Agent header, may encounter an error message like this:

Scripts should use an informative User-Agent string with contact information, or they may be blocked without notice.

Requests from disallowed user agents may instead encounter a less helpful error message like this:

Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes.

This change is most likely to affect scripts (bots) accessing Wikimedia websites such as Wikipedia automatically, via api.php or otherwise, and command line programs. If you run a bot, please send a User-Agent header identifying the bot with an identifier that isn't going to be confused with many other bots, and supplying some way of contacting you (e.g. a userpage on the local wiki, a userpage on a related wiki using interwiki linking syntax, a URI for a relevant external website, or an email address), e.g.:


JavaScript

Notes


See also