I'm trying to add in an automated fashion ~2000 approved wiki contributors to our wiki. (At askscience we want all ~2000 or so panelists to be able to edit the wiki, but not have general users edited it.)

First, I have tried doing it through the API, but couldn't figure out how to do it to add as wikicontributor to a subreddit not to tied to specific wiki page and was getting 403 errors. Details on my API attempt at the bottom.

Next, I tried doing this through client-side javascript. Go to the add wiki contributors page manually, logged in as myself, populate an array of users to add (which we maintain in a spreadsheet) and then use the following to add the users (with a delay of adding 1 user every 2 seconds originally; and 5 seconds on my second attempt). (Yes jQuery could do this more concisely, but basically this just types the name into each form and then simulates a click of the button with a delay of two seconds - using an IIFE and setTimeout).

for(i=0; i< users.length; i  ) {
setTimeout(
   (function(user) {
       return function() {
          var a = document.getElementById('name');
          a.value = user;
          var b = document.getElementsByClassName('btn')[0];
          var event = document.createEvent('UIEvents');
          event.initUIEvent('click', true, true, window, 1);
          b.dispatchEvent(event);
      }
   })(users[i]), 80000*i);
}

However, after I added about ~80 contributors last night (at a rate of 1 every 2seconds), I got SUBREDDIT_RATELIMIT error message. So this morning I tried again, and was able to get another ~80 or so in before the same error message popped up. This time adding at a rate of 1 every 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 80 seconds is fine, as is everything over 72 seconds,

Is there any published limits to avoid this SUBREDDIT_RATELIMIT? I really want to add ~2000 or so users.

API Attempt:

Using http://www.reddit.com/dev/api#POST_api_wiki_alloweditor_:act I tried something like (using python requests module):

 import requests
 headers = {'User-Agent': 'djimbob setting adding ask science panelists'}
 requests.post('http://www.reddit.com/api/wiki/alloweditor/add', data=dict(act='add', page='/r/askscience/wiki/', uh=modhash, username='asksci_throwaway'), headers=headers)

but kept getting 403's "forbidden - forbidden (reddit.com); you are not allowed to do that - wiki_disabled." (even though if I went to http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/about/wikicontributors/ I could add contributors). I think this is because it was trying to add editors only to a specific page; which is not what I want. We want the index only editable by mods; the other pages edited by all panelists.