The Hooded Man wrote:
It's not that my user agent is blocked, because it's sending: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1). I would send my own user agent string and not fake another, but from what I hear that's not necessary for most minor projects such as mine.
If we find you doing this, you will be blocked from access to Wikipedia. Falsifying user-agents is a fraudulent tool used by leeches trying to evade blocks.
*Always* use a real user-agent string which identifies you, including enough contact information (e-mail address or URL) that you can be reached in case you're running a legitimate bot of some sort that's causing problems by accident.
Could my IP be blocked, and if so, could I find out why? If not, are there any little tricks I need to know about a PHP script connecting to Wikipedia?
Might be, but we can't tell if you won't say what it is.
If you are grabbing pages live from Wikipedia and displaying them on your site with ads attached, or some other such, you will indeed be permanently blocked when you're discovered.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)