Talk:Global bans

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"Nominating for a ban"

After being alerted that a global administrator had requested to ban me, the form added to my surprise, the self-described "nominator" laying out his attacks in a section called "Nomination statement".

But I now realize that this language comes from this policy, for example in:

2. File a new request for comment on Meta. The title should have the username of the user nominated for a global ban. The nominator must impartially document the significant incidences that satisfy all criteria for global bans. The nominator must also attempt to show that the user's decision not to participate appropriately presents a current danger to all Wikimedia communities.

It later refers to what it calls a "nomination".

After considerable research, I found that there is such a thing as "negative nominations". However, I could not find any such usage outside sociometry, Wikimedia and… satire, which makes some of our requests sound all the more farcical😏. Moreover:

1. My (limited) research suggests that narrow field has not fully borrowed the lexeme; I see the verb and "nomination", but no signs of "nominator".
2. That sense fits a (generalized) definition of a nominee as someone best fitting a certain description. It still does not mean whether someone fits a description.

@Darklama, who introduced that terminology (which is used neither on the corresponding Wikipedia process nor on Wiktionary), has a well-written personal page which shows he natively speaks English (which is not my case), but also that “There are indeed more important things in life than contributing to Wikibooks.”, and appears to have indeed left (not just Wikibooks) a decade ago, so probably won’t tell us how confident he is about that choice. He may have gotten it from Wikivoyage, where it was introduced in 2005 by Studentvoice, an account which appears to be lost. I see no evidence that Darklama was involved in Wikivoyage (prior to 2014) though.

Is anyone against reverting that terminological part of the change? Chealer (talk) 2 August 2025 (UTC) (rectified 2025-08-04)

Goodness me, this is such a pedantic reason to argue over...though maybe I shouldn't be surprised who it's coming from. //shb (t • c) 06:47, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

Goodness, this is such a nonconstructive comment… though maybe I should be grateful you spend your time merely denigrating others rather than "nominating" them for bans, as you say. --Chealer (talk) 15:09, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

lol...as always nothing has changed. Nice attempt to play on my words btw. //shb (t • c) 00:52, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I oppose you reverting. Policies should be taken pragmatically and are not to be played around on wording, especially through means of wikilayering. This is just a further proof of your inability to drop the stick and change your behaviour.--A09|(pogovor) 09:06, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

It is unclear which stick you are referring to and what you mean by "wikilayering", but I fail to understand your intervention. This section is not about application (or "playing", if you please to call it that way), but terminology. If you could mention a reason for your opposition (other than "I don’t like its proposer"), that might make it constructive. --Chealer (talk) 15:09, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Blah blah blah. You're friendly with the term, since you've been blocked numerous times for this exact reason. And yes, your doing is exactly that – trying to invalidate the request for your global ban via semantics. I did mention a very good reason to oppose and if you don't like it is not my problem but yours. A09|(pogovor) 19:25, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

“ You're friendly with the term, since you've been blocked numerous times for this exact reason. ”

If you mean familiar, yes, I am familiar with the lexeme "nomin*"; otherwise I would not be reporting this. The question is why you oppose.

Which "exact reason" are you talking about?

“ And yes, your doing is exactly that – trying to invalidate the request for your global ban via semantics. ”
Please read before replying; none of this is about invalidating any request.

“  I did mention a very good reason to oppose and if you don't like it is not my problem but yours. ”
So which reason would that be? Chealer (talk) 22:23, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Don’t play with my words either, everything is stated above. A09|(pogovor) 14:42, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

I do not "play with other people’s words", in particular when those words are so unclear. Starting by not playing with words yourself and using existing vocabulary would help. Chealer (talk) 15:05, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Apologies. I have rectified my comment after stumbling on a page which made me realize that this language may indeed come from a project… no other than the English Wikipedia, which has been nominating articles for―ahem―deletion―for a couple decades, as this page shows. The earliest I can trace it to is this 2003 addition to Wikipedia’s deletion policy by @Eloquence, but his edit summary shows that it came from Votes for deletion, a page whose edit history was lost.

I gave up on the English Wikipedia years ago and will not be driving any fix there. --Chealer (talk) 15:09, 4 August 2025 (UTC), rectified 2025-08-07

(the old history of VfD is not lost, it's now at w:Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/archive May 2004). * Pppery * _{it has begun} 16:00, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I see; sorry and thank you very much Pppery. That points to this August 2002 edit as a likely first misuse of "nominate" on Wikimedia.

@The Cunctator: How confident are you about that use of "nominate" being valid? By the way, I would appreciate if you could qualify your level of mastery of English on your personal page. --Chealer (talk) 18:04, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

This has even caused a leak to the main namespace, which persists since 2021. --Chealer (talk) 13:49, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Preventing Forum Shopping and Punitive Use

I’ve seen what I think is an unintended (and counter-productive) use of this process: a user relied on 4–6 year old local project bans to seek a global ban, after raising a complaint at ENWP:ANI that did not yield a ban, effectively using stale bans to forum shop to bypass a local project’s dispute resolution process.

To keep the Global Bans policy aligned with its intent, I think it should require that at least one underlying permanent block/ban be recent. That would help prevent the process being used punitively years after the fact, and reduce the incentive to escalate to Meta simply because, for example, ENWP’s WP:ANI process didn’t produce the outcome someone wanted. Thoughts? Promethean (talk) 15:49, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

A recency requirement could undermine legitimate global ban discussions, though. This sort of forum shopping is pretty rare, I'm not sure we need rule changes to address, unless it's a more systemic problem. – Ajraddatz (talk) 21:12, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Fair and reasonable – Amending the policy could stifle off-wiki harassment / safety related discussions if not carefully constructed. There’s currently three criterion and a fourth ‘kinda’ criterion regarding Global Bans needing to be for exceptional reasons; Should the fourth criterion be rolled in to the list so the nominator has to explicitly explain why the situation is exceptional? I ask because it concerns me a majority of people supported the RFC in question despite the lack of procedural fairness that the obvious forum shopping represented. Promethean (talk) 21:39, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

I'm slightly late to the discussion, but I would also say no. If a situation is exceptional, it's likely a GB request will pass; if it's not, then it will likely fail. There are two issues I see with that fourth criteria: a) "exceptional" is a subjective term and can have the potential to sidetrack many otherwise legitimate GB requests over the technicalities of what is considered "exceptional"; b) GB requests may functionally be in English (as much as this project tries to make itself multilingual), but Meta is a multilingual community – I worry that this may increase the barrier for participants not well-versed in English to also start legitimate GB requests. Both of these issues significantly outweigh the rare case of forum shopping that happens (this is probably the first time I've witnessed it with a GB request), way more to warrant the necessity of the fourth point. //shb (t • c) 04:13, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

There are still stages in between a global ban request and enwiki WP:ANI. Global bans should be the upmost, dire action taken against a person to secure further project operations. The English Wikipedia community has enough procedures, that are well established and implemented, so opening a global ban request for a user, performing disruption in large, developed communities was uncalled for. A09|(pogovor) 15:31, 5 February 2026 (UTC)