User:Aron Manning/Design/Partial Block
Partial Blocks are a highly anticipated development, practically missing from the project since the community explosion around 2005. Site-wide blocks were designed for vandalism-only accounts in the early days of wikipedia, when contentious topics and disagreement between editors was not as common as nowadays. I've suggested partial blocks in the recent community discussions, unaware that it was already in development.
The purpose of blocking is to stop disruption, that usually happens in a specific area (an article / a topic / between specific users / etc.). A site-wide block unnecessarily removes the ability of a user to contribute to other, non-problematic areas, and removes the ability to communicate on-wiki, such as to participate in their own case on noticeboards, or in arbitration. This just causes problems and unnecessary bureaucratism, as seen in some of the comments in the well-known Fram case on enwiki.
Site-wide blocks are also unnecessarily punishing in non-trivial cases, when two good-faith editors disagree, and the dispute escalates. Because of this, the threat/fear of being blocked is often present in purely content disputes, negatively influencing the neutrality of the outcome. Partial blocks are a less harmful solution to minimize disruption.
—Aron Man.🍂 edits🌾 06:37, 10 December 2019 (UTC)
Design screenshots: phab:M255, Partial blocks#Second designs
- Design suggestion: list of articles recently edited. It would ease the task of admins selecting the blocked pages, if a list of articles recently edited by the partially blocked user were shown in a drop-down list, when that input field is selected.
- Design suggestion: white-list of pages that can be edited. In the case of site-wide blocks, the list of pages should serve as a white-list of pages that can be edited. The default value could be the noticeboards and arbitration pages (different per project), where the user can participate in, or appeal their case. In case of a non-appealable ban, or abuse of these pages, these can be removed from the list.
- Related phabricator ticket, and another similar ticket (closed, although the "duplicate" ticket does not cover this use-case). — Aron M (talk) 23:17, 19 September 2019 (UTC)
- Also requested on talk page.
- Design suggestion: pop-up editor for long lists of pages. To use partial blocks for topic bans that aren't covered by a single category, one has to add a great number of pages to the list, preferably in batch. This is not the primary use-case, therefore the UI necessary to do this should not be part of the basic blocking page, but rather a pop-up, that has 2 columns: the added pages on the left side, a search field and found pages on the right side. Adding pages is done by double-clicking them on the right side, or by selecting more pages (with shift-, ctrl-click, or with a selection box while the mouse button is pushed), then clicking an left-pointing arrow button between the two columns. Removing pages is done similarly on the left side.
- Multiple blocks with different expiration times will become necessary to allow long-term topic bans and short-term page blocks for the same user at the same time. Sample design: Community health initiative/Partial blocks/Multi-blocks
- Category blocks are necessary to implement topic bans.
