Anthony,
Yes, we will ban all IPs participating in this.
Guess it's just a matter of time until *reading* Wikipedia is unavailable to large portions of the world.
Your insight is entirely bogus here.
And "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT http://whatsmyuseragent.com/CommonUserAgents.asp#5.1)", is pretty much useless, unless you've already identified the spammer through some other process.
It isn't useless. It clearly shows that the user is acting malicious by having automated software that disguises under common user agent.
Do any of the other major websites completely block traffic when they see blank user agents?
I don't know about UA policies but... Various websites have various techniques to deal with such problems. On the other hand, no other major website has such scarcity of hardware and/or human resources as Wikipedia, at such exposure and API complexity provided.
BR, Domas