Mass account creation

Currently, on Wikimedia projects the number of accounts that can be created in a 24-hour period from a single IP is limited to six. It is to prevent cross-wiki vandals from creating batches of accounts in advance (even manually). There may be situations, including outreach events, where creating more would be helpful. Help:Mass account creation and Learning patterns/Six-account limit explain some of the ways to work around this limit. This page outlines options for situations when mass creation is needed.

If you coordinate your outreach event through the Programs & Events Dashboard, automatic exemptions are built in the workflow provided the attendees sign up and the coordinator creates the accounts using the dashboard controls.

Main help page: Help:Mass account creation

If you are going to be running many such events, you may wish to get the account creator permission on the wikis that will be involved in your events. Account creator permissions are project specific. If you are an administrator or bureaucrat on the given Wiki, you may have account creator permission already, as this is the default MediaWiki configuration. (If you aren't sure if this applies to your wiki, check Special:ListGroupRights and see if your group includes "Not be affected by rate limits (noratelimit)". If so, your group has account creator permission.)

Because of the Single User Login (SUL) system, granting the right on any Wikimedia wiki will suffice; that user will then be able to create accounts, on that wiki, that work on all Wikimedia wikis. So if you can add the right on a single Wikimedia wiki, you can add this right locally, and the recipient will be able to create accounts locally.

For each wiki on which you wish account creator permission:

• Check Special:ListGroupRights to see if, on that wiki, local sysops/administrators or bureaucrats are able to assign people to the "account creators" group. If they are, contact a local sysop or bureaucrat to request permission. At almost all wikis, bureaucrats can do this task.

• You can find a list of these people on any given wiki at Special:ListUsers/sysop.
• Since not all sysops and bureaucrats will be active, look at a few of the users' recent contributions and choose three that have recently edited.
• Post to their talk pages and request the account creator permission. You should link to past events you've run or other proof that you're a credible person, not a spammer.

• If a local wiki's sysops or bureaucrats can't assign you to the group, or if you don't get any response from them, try posting your request to Steward requests/Permissions.

If the local user doesn't know how to add the right, send them to the Special:UserRights help.

• On the English Wikipedia, the Event coordinator page is the best place to request this permission. The Event coordinator permission allows you to mass create accounts and also grant the confirmed user right to accounts (allowing them to create new articles).

Many people who are organizing Wikipedia events find this option confusing. Choosing this option usually requires having a conversation with the network administrator at the location where the group of people will register Wikimedia accounts. Rarely do people without a good relationship to the site tech team make this option work for them. Although this option is recommended for all sorts of people who host Wikipedia events, please note that this is more complicated than typical event management. However, unlike the other methods explained above, this will also raise edit rate limits for your participants to 90 edits/minute for each participant, instead of the default limit for newbies 8 edits/minute for all newbies coming from the same IP address. Please be aware, this type of exemption only applies to attendees that are using the network of the location (e.g. using a venue's wireless local network) but will not apply to people using their own Internet access at the location (e.g. a cellular data plan).

While there are alternatives which make it easy to create accounts beyond the limit, there are sometimes situations where it would be preferable to open an IP to allow registering in a standard way and to avoid incurring in edit rate limits, especially for events with hundreds of attendees. Experience shows that encouraging participants to create their own accounts often helps them feel more engaged. What follows is the procedure to request a temporary lift of the account creation cap on a specific IP for an outreach event. Please consider if it's really necessary to take this more bureaucratic way.

1. File a task in Wikimedia's bug tracker for the site request, under the "Wikimedia-Site-requests" project tag. (See mw:Phabricator/Help for more information about Wikimedia's task tracker.) Include the following information:
   • The event time frame (start and end) of your event, and the time zone you expressed the hours (local or UTC)
   • The IPs to allow (you may have to contact the venue organization to learn this information)
   • The expected number of people to attend the event
   • The list of wikis you wish to allow account creation on
   • A link to the Wiki page discussing the event or, if there is no such page, a link to your user page on your primary wiki
2. It is highly recommended doing this at least two weeks, preferably more, in advance, even if you don't know the IP yet. If filed on short notice, you can try to find a sysadmin to assist by going to the IRC channel #wikimedia-tech.

See also Requesting wiki configuration changes; wikitech:Increasing account creation threshold contains instructions for the sysadmin.

• mw:Extension:ThrottleOverride / phab:T27000