No open proxies/lt

Publicly available proxies (including paid proxies) may be blocked for any period at any time. While this may affect legitimate users, they are not the intended targets and may freely use proxies until those are blocked. Tor editing, on the other hand, is automatically prevented. No restrictions are placed on reading Meta or another Wikimedia project through an open or anonymous proxy.

Non-static IP addresses or hosts that are otherwise not permanent proxies should typically be blocked for a shorter period of time, as it is likely the IP address will eventually be transferred or dynamically reassigned, or the open proxy closed. Once closed, the IP address should be unblocked.

Editors can be permitted to edit by way of an open proxy with the IP block exempt flag. This is granted on local projects by administrators and globally by stewards.

However, many users are known to access through open proxy unknowingly due to the default setting of their browser. Before you apply for the IP block exemption (which may take time and is not guaranteed to be granted), you should check the internet connection preference of your browser and change it to no proxy access.

If your IP address has been blocked on all wikis^[1] and you believe this was by mistake, or if you need to use Tor/proxies for valid reasons and can't,^[2] you can contact the stewards. They can remove the global block or grant your account an exemption.

If your IP is an open proxy, it will not be unblocked. It is more likely for an exception to be granted if you provide good reasons to think you won't abuse it; obvious cases are, for instance, users blocked by the Chinese Great Firewall and accounts with substantial past contributions.

If a Tor exception is granted to you, and you don't have an account yet, the steward will also create one for you, and you'll receive a temporary password to your email address.

Please do not place a local unblock request on your user talk page, they are reserved for local blocks. Local administrators are unable to remove global blocks, and will simply repeat the general instructions.

If you are interested in editing only one or a few wikis, you may want to ask for a local exception. Projects with a policy permitting exemptions are listed as examples here:

For other projects, check with their policies or contact a local sysop there.

Proxy services change a contributor's internet connection, so that instead of connecting to Wikimedia projects directly, the connection is rerouted through services of the proxy provider.

Although Meta encourages anyone in the world to contribute, such proxies are often exploited for abusive purposes. Because MediaWiki (the wiki software) depends on IP addresses for administrator intervention against abuse, open proxies allow users to completely circumvent administrators. The use of scripts or unapproved bots allow malicious users to rapidly rotate IP addresses, causing continuous disruption that cannot be stopped by helpless administrators. Several such attacks have occurred on Wikimedia projects, causing heavy disruption and occupying administrators who would otherwise deal with other concerns.

This policy is known to cause difficulty for some editors, who must use open proxies to circumvent censorship where they live; a well-known example is the government of the People's Republic of China, which sporadically attempts to prevent the people in China from reading or editing Wikipedia.