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Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Anti-harassment/Per-page user blocking

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Per-page user blocking

  • Problem:

On EN wikipedia we go through four levels of warnings before we block vandals, but we have a hair trigger for blocking edit warrers. This is crazy, we rarely turn vandals in to useful editors (OK some come back when they've grown up) but almost all edit warrers are useful members of the community who just get over enthusiastic.

  • Who would benefit:

Everyone who gets into editing disputes, everyone who tries to resolve such disputes and those who wish we could resolve things without always first going to a block.

  • Proposed solution:

A new level of page protection - protect v named individuals. Admins would be able to resolve edit warring incidents by protecting the page where the edit war was taking place against editing by particular named accounts. This would need to be independent of whether the page was also under pending changes, semi protection or extended confirmed protection. Blocking would still be an option, but we would now have an option to resolve things with less grief.

The edit warrers would then be free to edit elsewhere.

This tool would also be useful for some cases where interaction bans apply.

  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion

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"almost all edit warrers are useful members of the community who just get over enthusiastic"

That doesn't make it ok. Edit wars are counterproductive, antagonistic, and stressful, and drive people away from editing. Needlessly aggressive behavior like edit warring should be heavily discouraged. — Omegatron (talk) 02:24, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, and stopping people from editing that page would still be heavy discouragement. But why continue the current system where we deal much more harshly with edit warring than we do with vandalism? Even with this proposal most vandals get a warning on first, second, third and fourth offences, whilst an edit warrer would currently get a block on first offence and under this proposal instead of a series of four warnings would start with the page being protected against them with escalation to a block. Both edit warring and vandalism are wrong, why do you want us to treat edit warring so much more harshly? WereSpielChequers (talk) 09:46, 11 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
WereSpielChequers, would it be okay if we retitled this proposal "Per-user page blocking"? It's not as eye-catching as "Edit Warring - a better solution", but it's a more neutral point of view. :) -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Danny, how about "page protection v specified accounts" as I'm keen to have this considered a form of page protection rather than a type of user blocking. WereSpielChequers (talk) 22:20, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have encountered few Edit wars in my time on wikipedia, but I did encounter problematic editors who reverted my edits on sight. My usual reaction was to walk away because of the hassle involved in reporting edit-wars to the "authorities". If this proposal will simplify the process and not be prone to abuse, it may save a whole lot of cumulative editing time. Ottawahitech (talk) 14:29, 14 November 2017 (UTC) Please ping me[reply]
This Addition makes a lot of sense, while it may not be easy to implement. Anyhow, let's put it on the wishlist. --Bernd.Brincken (talk) 19:11, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely makes sense.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:15, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This has already been proposed in the Admin section (which is probably a better place for protection/blocking proposals):

Those frame it as blocking, not protection, but it's essentially the same thing. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 04:08, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The three proposals are all slightly different.
Anomie (talk) 23:22, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think this is a coercive calm design that avoids excessive useless disputes that arise in the editing or discussion of a specific entry. This should not appear to young editors. This may be more suitable to an injunction policy, but apply a policy may be more controversial than the feature. It should not be long-term, just a few days/weeks to calm down and alert this to affect others. This does not apply if this is bound to cause disruption. 1/2 support, I suspect that this bring a problem, the parties may continue to see other people doing similar controversial edits and can not intervene, it brings a negative perception, unless also prevent the parties contact (including activity and view) the particular page.--YFdyh000 (talk) 09:01, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello all — This item did not make the Top 10 for the 2017 Wishlist, but the Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team is already looking into building better blocking tools in early 2018. Support for this proposal and the comments are already being taken into account. Read more and participate in the discussion at Community health initiative/Blocking tools and improvements. Thank you, and I hope to see you there! — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager 🗨 23:07, 14 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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