Angela:
The problem is not being ignored. The developers have already worked out a way to whitelist certain users, at least for editing if not yet for account creation. Better solutions and alternative approaches are being discussed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proxy_blocking
One thing we discussed on IRC yesterday is to a) require logging in when editing from an open proxy, b) require a captcha for every login or account creation from an open proxy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
If the captcha is hard to break - I'm told that, for example, Yahoo!'s is very difficult to break - this should make us relatively secure against spambot and vandal attacks, as we can deal with a limited supply of identities.
The most difficult part of the implementation is probably the captcha itself. The person on IRC who specialized in captchas said that http://jcaptcha.sourceforge.net/ is a good, free implementation. A problem is that it runs on Java.
I would be strongly opposed to requiring captchas for all logins, even those which do not come from open proxies, because a visual captcha would exclude blind people from accessing Wikipedia.
I'd be happy to put further evaluation of this issue on the agenda for the next research meeting. However, Tim might be more willing to work on something in his free time if there's not yet a full-fledged proposal out there. So I'd like to ask Tim to comment first on whether he wants to work on a solution to the problem, not necessarily the one outlined above.
Best,
Erik