Manual:$wgRateLimits/en

Details
This setting provides a simple rate limiter to brake floods of edits and other potentially destructive behavior, like sending out emails to other users. It sets a maximum number of actions allowed in the given number of seconds; after that, the violating client receives HTTP 500 error pages until the period elapses. To check if a rate limit has been exceeded, use the User::pingLimiter function.

For example, to set a maximum of 4 edits per 60 seconds for "newbie" (i.e. non-autoconfirmed) users, add the following:

The  limit applies to both unregistered and "newbie" users. The  limit applies by action and user, and the   limit by action and IP. So if you have many newbies using the same IP address, they all aggregate in the same count for the  limit.

must be set to a value other than CACHE_NONE for this setting to work.

Version differences

 * The 'mailpassword' array was added in MediaWiki 1.7.0.
 * The 'emailuser' array was added in MediaWiki 1.10.0.
 * The 'linkpurge' array was added in MediaWiki 1.22.0.
 * The 'renderfile' array was added in MediaWiki 1.22.0.