On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 11:21 AM Florence Devouard fdevouard@gmail.com wrote:
Short version : We need to find solutions to avoid so many africans being globally IP blocked due to our No Open Proxies policy. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/No_open_proxies/Unfair_blocking
This matches up with my observations as well. Over the last couple of years, it has been increasingly common for new editors to be affected by range blocks without any understanding of why. We see this frequently with Wiki Education's student editors, and in most cases, the editors are not knowingly using a VPN or other non-standard way of connecting to the internet. In some cases, institutions are now using VPNs at the network level by default. In other cases, patterns of how people connect are just shifting so that they are more often assigned temporary IP addresses that are covered by range blocks.
These kinds of blocks also prevent account creation, which Wiki Education can easily work around by creating accounts on these user's behalf (and event organizers using Programs & Events Dashboard similarly have tools to work around this). But there are certainly many, many more good faith would-be contributors who are stopped before they can create an account, and they have no user-friendly recourse to understand why they are affected by a block or how to work around it.
My sense is that this is an important problem that merits attention at the global level.
-Sage