Hi there,
I am not sure which would be the preferred mailing list for this kind
of a suggestion (wikitech, comcom, internal, this one) so I flipped
two coins.
As far as I know, we are constantly blocking people when they are
live-mirroring Wikipedia (instead of downloading the dump or
negotiating a data feed). Apart from that, there is no consequence for
the people running a live mirror. I remember at least one instance in
which the person running the mirror tried to change IP addresses
faster than they were blocked.
I can imagine that this is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating
effort. My suggestion would be not to block these IP addresses any
more but to deliver slightly modified content to them, basically the
same Wikipedia text plus a ad banner or Google Adsense box right above
the text or next to it. That way, it would at least be of some sort of
reward for the foundation running the servers...
What do you think about it?
Mathias