Community health initiative/Allow users to restrict which user groups can edit their own user page, talk page and subpages thereof

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This page documents a feature the Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team may build. Development of this feature has not been decided or prioritized.

🗣   We invite you to join the discussion!

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T176270

This page will be used to collate ideas about building personal userspace protection tools which allow users to broadly prevent groups of users from interacting with them.

At the moment, these features are conceptual. The Anti-Harassment Tools team has not prioritized this work but is considering these features for future development. Input on this page or the talk page is encouraged and appreciated.

Background[edit]

User pages are collaborative spaces often used for creating to-do lists, collections of helpful links or tools, and snippets of copy-and-paste wikitext. The English Wikipedia policy for user pages can be found at Wikipedia:User_pages.

Many userpages are also curated by the associated user account to share autobiographical information, either in an encyclopedic format or in a more personal and social format. This information, coupled with the fact that the page is associated with their username, is a part of the user's online identity. Vandalism to user pages are not standard content vandalism, they are a form of personal attacks designed to hurt or humiliate the subject of the userpage. Patrolling the AbuseFilter logs shows some horrendous personal attacks to illustrate the types of hurtful messages.

After a lengthy conversation on ENWP and a vote on FRWP, an AbuseFilter (#803 on ENWP) was enabled that prohibits IPs and newly registered accounts from editing the user pages of all other accounts (except Jimbo). User talk pages were not touched. In the discussion stronger protection limits were proposed, but ultimately rejected due to the scale of the solution. Allowing individual users to set their own userpage protection might be a viable alternative.

User page protection[edit]

On wikis where a user has 1+ edits[edit]

  • Users could have a user preference that allows them to select who can edit and move their user page and user page subpages:
    • Everyone
    • Only registered users
    • Only autoconfirmed users (Default)
    • Extendedconfirmed users and admins
    • Only admins
  • The user preference would appear on the 'User profile' tab of preferences.

On wikis where a user has never edited[edit]

  • Option 1: Could be the same user preference, with the default set to 'admins' only
    • The preference could change when the user makes their first edit
  • Option 2: Inform the user to set this via Global preferences
    • What if the usergroups are different on other wikis?

User talk page protection[edit]

On wikis where a user has 1+ edits[edit]

  • Users could have a user preference that allows them to select who can edit their user talk page and subpages:
    • Everyone (default)
    • Only registered users
    • Only autoconfirmed users
  • This user preference would appear on the 'User profile' tab of preferences.

On wikis where a user has never edited[edit]

  • Option 1: User talk pages are protected against edits by all users except admins until the user make their first edit on that wiki
  • Option 2: Inform the user to set this via Global preferences
  • Option 3: Instead of an outright protection, we could show a warning message, along the lines of "USERNAME has not edited on SITENAME. Would you like to continue writing on their talk page? [OK]"

Wireframes[edit]

Potential wireframe for these new options

Use cases[edit]

  • A malicious user is creating socks to harass User:Apples by making harassing edits on Apples' user page.
    • Some sock bots are sophisticated enough to wait out the edit and time requirements to achieve autoconfirmed status.
  • A malicious user is using socks to targeting User:Bananas on multiple wikis. It's not egregious enough for Stewards to intervene but it is making Bananas reconsider disabling all emails and notifications from Wikimedia, or quitting editing altogether.
  • User:Carrots regularly receives notifications from users editing his Japanese Wikipedia user talk page, despite never editing there. It's probably just a typo or mistake, but it is annoying.

See also[edit]

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