Through a message on another list, I found that when one tries to reach wikipedia (or at least wikipedia-en) specifying the User Agent as "Python-urllib/1.17", the server gives a "403 Forbidden" response, together with the content of the page.
Two questions: 1. Why is this User Agent getting this response? If I remember correctly, this was installed in the early days of the pywikipediabot, when Brion wanted to block it because it had a programming error causing it to fetch each page twice (sometimes even more?). If that is the actual reason, I see no reason why it should still be active years afterward... 2. If this User Agent is really to be blocked, why do we still provide the content of the page that is forbidden?