User talk:WMFOffice

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Slowking4 foundation ban

Hi,
Back in 2020 there was an RfC proposing a global ban for Slowking4: Requests for comment/Slowking4. This RfC found no consensus.
You globally banned Slowking4 today. Has there been another RfC? Has something substantially changed since the last RfC? Slowking4 wasn't banned from Wikisource which is where they contributed most.
Also noting I really dislike you blanking talk pages. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 12:44, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz This is my own opinion, and it's not related to the foundation nor the account: Foundation Global Ban doesn't require community consensus, and actually the discussion was archived by the bot, which means it was moved to the archive page, not deleted. Taiwanese Elephant🐘(talk|contribs) 12:56, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

I found another RfC, Requests for comment/Global ban for Slowking4 (2). It was closed as "not yet sufficient consensus".
臺灣象象, I know it technically doesn't require that. But in cases where the community has spoken, going against that same community without new facts would not be a good show.
actually the discussion was archived by the bot, which means it was moved to the archive page, not deleted.
You mean the revision history? That's not moving. WMFOffice blanked the page. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:06, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz Sorry, I thought you are talking about the talk page of WMFOffice. For sometimes the proofs could be private, and seems the rfc has been closed for almost two years, maybe there are some new facts for global ban the user. Anyway, you can still ask the foundation to explain the reason for global ban the user. Taiwanese Elephant🐘(talk|contribs) 13:24, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

And maybe it's better to ask the foundation by email, since it usually related to the private proofs. Taiwanese Elephant🐘(talk|contribs) 13:26, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

臺灣象象, details might be private, but the foundation could (and imho should) give at least some information. If the reason for the ban is new, they could say "Slowking4 was banned for reasons unrelated to those mentioned in the linked RfCs" without revealing anything private. Or they could say "One or more issues raised in the RfC took a significant turn for the worse which required direct action to prevent considerable harm to the community." If there's nothing new, they could say "Yeah we know the community found no consensus. But like, what are they gonna do?" which would come across rather rude, but they should be upfront about whatever happened.
I once mailed them to inquire about a global ban. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt a 100% boilerplate mail that said "we can't talk about this whatsoever because privacy". — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:41, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

For a WMF-legal ban? There are a load of potential good reasons why that may not be possible. JzG (talk) 10:13, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Abd foundation ban

FYI, Abd is apparently deceased. https://www.reddit.com/r/Quraniyoon/comments/1c5b1rd/abd_ulrahman_daniel_lomax_uabdlomax_passed_from/ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1229003111#Abd You probably already knew, I guess. JzG (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

user:Henry200034

Hello. This user is globaly banned. For your information, on frwiki we have found a lot of Sockpuppets : fr:Wikipédia:Faux-nez/Ro222.88893.345. Supertoff (talk) 10:19, 22 March 2026 (UTC)

Banned user's user rights

Good day, there are outstanding rights from Special:CentralAuth/Боки, Special:CentralAuth/Sadko, Special:CentralAuth/MareBG, Special:CentralAuth/CarRadovan that are typically removed when they're locked. --Min☠︎rax^«¦talk¦» 13:58, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Note that this mass ban of administrators of Serbian Wikipedia seems very fishy and probably there was abuse of WMF reporting mechanisms to enact it, as there were no public discussions at all. Ђидо (talk) 16:12, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Unlikely to community ban, foundation bans are private in order to protect the privacy of all parties involved. Please see WMF Global Ban Policy. But the affected users always can individually email to ca@wikimedia.org. 🪶-TΛNBIRUZZΛMΛN (💬) 17:25, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

I am just saying that, given that I never saw such mass ban of users in good standing of one Wikipedia. List includes six active users, among them two admins, one interface admin and two former admins. There were no complaints against them locally at Serbian Wikipedia, there was no known clashes recently. Yet, they are summarily banned based on, I assume, non-founded accusations.

I would like to understand what oversight exists for actions of WMF staff, when community suspects a foul play?

Ђидо (talk) 06:10, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

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Thank you, minorax, for the notice (the team is alerted) and Tanbiruzzaman for sharing that context. <3

Ђидо, I completely understand that this must be confusing and distressing for the Serbian community as well as others who don’t understand the basis of the action. Truly, I am sorry about that. I know this process differs enough from community sanction processes that the approach can be very jarring. I regret that we are not able to share the cause of Foundation office actions. This is a balance necessary to protect the movement and its participants, including often individuals who are subject to sanctions who have a right to dignity even if we have assessed a need to restrict them from our platforms. It is also essential that we protect the safety of reporters and others in communities who may risk harm.

Every investigation by Foundation’s trust & safety teams are analyzed against the Terms of Use to which every user agrees when editing Wikimedia’s sites. Trust & Safety is not authorized to execute office actions without attorney and, frequently, executive staff review, including several senior legal department staff members. While the process differs from those of community governance bodies, it is rigorous and lengthy. In the matter of oversight, beyond the senior structures that review the work of the team within the Foundation itself, there is a Case Review Committee of community volunteers who are able to assess cases if asked by direct participants. They are not able to review appeals brought by bystanders. You can read more about the committee and their process here: Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Community Resilience and Sustainability/Trust and Safety/Case Review Committee. –Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:41, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF): Youre action has created a chilling effect withing the serbian and neighburing southslavic communities who are following this. There was literally no consensus from communities part to do this, taking into account that were quite a heterogenic community regarding our wordviews. No one supports this. We expect a detailed, communitarian answer regarding this action given what you have written, and not some default corporatist HR reply. Please take this seriously as we do, we in the community are shocked by this action! --Ivan VA (talk) 00:53, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I regret that we are not able to share the cause of Foundation office actions.
This response is frankly unacceptable.

You are asking entire communities to trust a process that provides zero visibility, zero accountability, and no way to independently assess the proportionality of the actions taken — even when those actions affect multiple highly trusted functionaries.

This is not about disagreement with specific sanctions. It is about the precedent being established.

Right now, the Foundation is asserting the ability to remove core governance actors in a project, at scale, without providing any meaningful explanation to the community that is expected to continue operating that project.

That fundamentally undermines the principle of community self-governance on which Wikimedia projects are built.

“Trust us” is not a governance model.

If there are legitimate safety or legal constraints preventing full disclosure, then the Foundation must develop mechanisms for at least partial, anonymized, or structured transparency — otherwise communities are left in a position where they are expected to accept decisions they cannot evaluate, understand, or learn from.

At the moment, this does not look like a balance between safety and transparency. It looks like a complete removal of accountability.

Are there any plans to introduce transparency standards for office actions that affect community governance roles?

The current approach creates a dangerous precedent where any project’s governance can be effectively overridden without explanation. Iniquity (talk) 16:54, 4 April 2026 (UTC)

@Mdennis (WMF) Hello Maggie, is there a possibility for higher structures to additionally review the decision-making process, regarding the global ban? Do you believe it is possible for mistacke to occur in the process, or...that maybe not all facts were presented correctly—for example, by the aforementioned volunteers? If this were about vandals, rule-breakers, or individuals who had evidently and grossly violated the rules, the wiki community would understand. However, given that many of them are respected fellow editors on the Serbian Wikipedia project, the community is quite in shock, including the representatives of Wikimedia Serbia. See massive reaction and number of comments on link. Pisanija (talk) 19:58, 4 April 2026 (UTC)

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Hi Ivan VA, Iniquity, and Pisanija. I hear and understand the concerns about transparency, and I also understand that it may not be possible for you to trust a process or findings in which you have no visibility. I also understand that my responses feel corporate, because I can’t engage with the level of detail some would prefer and our approaches frequently feel alien to community protocols. I was a volunteer administrator for years before I came to the Foundation, so I am personally keenly aware of the differences.

We have a great deal of respect for community self-governance, which has proven repeatedly to work well on Wikimedia projects. It’s fundamental. Community members have the best perspective on their local policies and environments and can do far more than we can to monitor and guide participation.

We do what we can to partner with community governance volunteers. We meet routinely with the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee and, when desired, language-specific Arbitration Committees. However, we do work in partnership. The Foundation also has a role and responsibility that we must adhere to as platform provider. This is why we reserve and sometimes exercise the right to use our enforcement discretion with respect to our Terms of Use. (See the last paragraph of Section 4) We are not able to do this through community consensus processes.

I do need to correct any confusion that this is a precedent-setting event. Large-scale direct actions are unusual for the Foundation’s Trust & Safety workflows, as we rely on community self-governance most of the time, but it is not the first time that T&S has enforced group Office Actions impacting a specific language Wikipedia.

I can’t discuss the particulars of the case even though it might reassure people who find the action alarming. As far as the possibility of a mistake having been made in any particular decision, no system is mistake-proof. We have built into our processes multiple layers of review by people who were not involved in the prior layer. This process is documented here. Every Trust & Safety action the Foundation takes is directly and explicitly connected to provisions within the Terms of Use and reviewers are expected to evaluate whether the evidence supplied demonstrates violations of those Terms of Use and whether the situation can instead have been handled by community self-governance. As an additional step, the Case Review Committee was created to protect community members from overly intrusive, overly strict, or overly lax enforcement of conduct standards by the Foundation. While matters that involve statutory, regulatory, employment or legal policies cannot be overturned, the Foundation defaults to allowing the CRC to review and at least advise whenever possible. In addition to this avenue, which is available to users who are directly involved in cases, we routinely review our approaches to sanctions and investigations, including ensuring we remain up to date on the legal requirements of platform providers as apply to us.

I understand that these kinds of situations can have a chilling effect. We are willing to do what we can to help with that, although that can’t include disclosing or discussing the specifics of any case. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the detailed response. I appreciate the acknowledgment regarding trust and the limitations of transparency. However, this is exactly where the core issue lies — it is not just a matter of perception or communication style, but of how this model functions in practice for communities.

The issue is not whether WMF has the authority to act under the Terms of Use. That is understood. The concern is about the operational impact such actions have on the stability and functioning of community governance.

When multiple administrators and checkusers are banned in a single action, this is not just enforcement — it is a direct disruption of the project’s governance structure. In such situations, the complete absence of contextual transparency creates a gap that communities cannot realistically compensate for.

Local contributors are left without any ability to determine whether the issue was individual misconduct, coordinated behavior, or a broader governance failure. As a result, there is no way to assess whether similar risks remain within the project.

You mentioned the “chilling effect,” and this is precisely where it manifests most strongly. The uncertainty does not only affect those sanctioned — it affects all current and future functionaries, who are now expected to operate without a clear understanding of practical boundaries or risk factors beyond a general reference to the Terms of Use.

In most governance systems, transparency is not only a matter of accountability, but a mechanism for maintaining predictability and operational stability. When that layer is absent, uncertainty itself becomes a systemic governance risk.

At present, the model effectively requires communities to trust internal processes that are entirely non-observable from the outside. Internal review layers and the CRC do not address this issue from the perspective of the broader community, which remains unable to evaluate, contextualize, or learn from such interventions.

Given this, several concrete questions arise:

• How is a community expected to restore and maintain stable governance after a large-scale intervention of this kind without any contextual information?
• What guidance, if any, is provided to remaining or newly appointed functionaries to prevent similar situations?
• How does WMF assess the acceptable level of uncertainty introduced into a project when taking actions of this scale?
• Are there defined thresholds at which some form of high-level or anonymized transparency becomes necessary due to the governance impact?

Without clear answers to these questions, the current approach does not appear to balance safety and transparency. Instead, it creates a situation where governance structures are disrupted without providing communities the means to adapt or respond in an informed way.

This, in itself, becomes a risk to the long-term stability of community self-governance and, at the moment, the absence of transparency is not just a limitation — it is actively contributing to governance instability. Iniquity (talk) 22:07, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Hello, Iniquity. I hear what you are saying, and I appreciate you speaking openly about it. You are right that this goes beyond the communication style - it speaks to how the system actually operates and how those effects are experienced by communities in practice.

I recognize that situations like this can feel deeply destabilizing, and that impact should not be understated. While I have seen that communities can find ways to recover over time, I understand that does not lessen the significance of what is happening right now.

In reflecting on your questions, I can share that, in my experience, stronger outcomes tend to emerge when communities are supported in building structures that are empowered to evaluate systemic issues more robustly. The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee, of course, exists now, but as the enforcement guidelines [1] note, there is still space for project wide structures - such as arbitration committees - that can evaluate and address problems much earlier in their development than the Foundation typically can, and with a broader range of tools. I also think there is still an open question about how effectively these kinds of bodies can be leveraged or strengthened in moments like this and how these kinds of structures can best support communities in moments like this. This may be something worth exploring together.

In practice, Trust and Safety is often able to engage directly with non-disclosure agreement - bound bodies, including the U4C, many arbitration committees, and the stewards. Those conversations have been valuable in working through areas of concern, and we are continuing to invest in and expand that kind of collaboration - for example, by recently bringing together members of global arbitration committees and the U4C for in-person discussion.

At the same time, governance in these spaces is only becoming more complex. Whether through an arbitration committee or another trusted body able to handle nonpublic information, my experience has been that communities often find it easier to place trust in structures made up of people they have selected themselves. In the absence of such structures, the most constructive guidance I can offer here is to adhere closely to the behavioral expectations set out in the Universal Code of Conduct, which are designed to prevent many of the kinds of issues reflected in the Terms of Use. I am also open to continuing conversations at a general level, where that is helpful, as long as they do not involve the specifics of individual cases.

I also want to acknowledge the concern around how decisions like this are made. The Foundation aims to act thoughtfully in Trust and Safety cases, with multiple layers of review. Part of that process involves weighing different kinds of potential harm, including the disruption caused by taking action and the risks associated with not acting. While I cannot speak to the specifics of this case - and I understand that saying so may not ease concerns - we were aware that the impact on the community would be significant.

That awareness is part of why I am here, making time to engage in this conversation, and why we are open to connecting with community members in good standing to explore ways to support rebuilding. At the same time, I fully understand that offers like this may be met with hesitation or mistrust, and that rebuilding confidence can take time.

There are also important reasons why specific details in Trust and Safety cases are not made public, including to community members and groups who do not operate under non-disclosure agreements. These considerations can include protecting reporters and witnesses, safeguarding the reputations of individuals involved, and preserving sensitive resources the Foundation is responsible for. Wikimedia is both a social movement and a legal entity operating in a very complex environment, where the risks of over-transparency can sometimes be serious and irreversible. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

I think this shifts the focus away from the core issue.

The problem here is not whether communities have sufficiently strong internal structures or trusted bodies to work with non-public information, but the fact that a large-scale intervention has already taken place and directly disrupted governance without providing any contextual clarity; regardless of the existence of arbitration committees, U4C, or other NDA-bound groups, the broader community is still left without any way to understand what happened, what kind of issue this was, or whether similar risks remain, and this gap cannot be resolved simply by pointing to existing or potential governance structures.

Introducing or strengthening such structures does not address the immediate question of how communities are expected to function after an intervention of this scale under conditions of complete uncertainty; even if some limited information can be shared with select NDA-bound bodies, the majority of functionaries and contributors remain outside of that scope, and are still expected to operate and make decisions without any practical understanding of risk boundaries, so the question remains — how is stable governance supposed to be maintained in practice under these conditions, and what mechanism, if any, exists to reduce this uncertainty at the community level rather than within closed structures? Iniquity (talk) 18:03, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Hello, Iniquity. My goal was to address your questions while also sharing our general approach. The core issue you are circling seems to be disagreement with the approach and concern that it will be an irrecoverable issue. On governance stability, my perspective comes from approaches I have seen work in practice, including the large-scale intervention I mentioned earlier. I don’t want to minimize the challenge, but I have seen communities come together and recover under similar conditions. If there is something specific I have missed, especially in the second part of your question, please let me know and I will do my best to address it directly. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:50, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

This is not about whether recovery is possible in principle, but about how it is supposed to happen in practice: after the removal of multiple administrators and checkusers, a project faces concrete tasks — appointing new functionaries, reviewing existing processes, and determining whether the issue was with specific individuals or with the governance system itself, and right now there is no basis for any of these decisions because there is not even a basic understanding of the nature of the problem.

At the moment, the situation effectively requires the community to guess what went wrong and make governance decisions based on that, risking either repeating the same issue or overcorrecting and introducing unnecessary restrictions; so the question becomes very concrete, again, — what exactly are functionaries supposed to rely on when restoring governance, and is there any mechanism at all that reduces this uncertainty at the community level rather than only within closed, NDA-bound structures? Iniquity (talk) 15:09, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

There is also a separate concern that requires clarification.

Several contributors from Serbian Wikipedia have pointed to a sharp and synchronized increase in activity by users who hold administrator rights in closely related language projects, specifically Croatian (hr.wiki), Serbo-Croatian (sh.wiki), and Bosnian (bs.wiki), who, following the intervention, began actively participating in editing articles on Serbian Wikipedia; given the timing and nature of this activity, a direct question arises — is this merely a coincidence, or is such involvement in any way coordinated, encouraged, or at least anticipated by WMF, and has there been any communication or engagement with administrators from these projects in relation to the current situation? Iniquity (talk) 15:38, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I’d advise remaining functionaries and volunteers to review the Terms of Use and the Universal Code of Conduct and consider how to ensure their behavior adheres to that, including by welcome debate and contributors from other projects. I don’t see increased activity by editors on other projects as a problem, per se. Of course, we haven’t coordinated or encouraged editing elsewhere, but we also regard it as a healthy function of a global movement. We assume all these contributors will also adhere to the Terms of Use which includes respecting local policies and working with local administrators. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

This still does not address the core issue. Referring to the Terms of Use and the Universal Code of Conduct provides no practical guidance for the current situation; as a result, the community is effectively forced to rebuild governance blindly, without any understanding of what exactly went wrong or what risks remain. This is no longer a matter of communication or perception, but a lack of the minimal operational clarity required for the system to function.

The problem goes far beyond a single project — it directly affects how other communities assess their own risk, especially in complex or sensitive environments, while no criteria or signals are provided at all. In its current form, this does not appear as an exceptional measure but as a model that does not provide communities with the conditions necessary for sustainable governance. This creates a situation where interventions of this scale occur without clear boundaries, while communities are left responsible for the consequences without the tools needed for informed governance.

It is also worth noting that the response regarding the sharply increased activity of contributors from other projects does not resolve the concern: cross-wiki participation is indeed a normal part of the movement, but in this case the issue is the synchronized activity coinciding with the intervention, and it is precisely this context that remains unexplained, which only adds to the overall uncertainty.

So the question remains direct: what concrete boundaries or criteria is WMF prepared to define so that communities can understand when such interventions may occur and how they are expected to act afterwards, and what mechanisms, if any, exist to reduce this uncertainty at the community level rather than only within closed structures? Iniquity (talk) 19:04, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

The concrete boundaries and criteria we have defined are the Terms of Use and the Code of Conduct along with a suite of other Foundation policies and community policies we require adherence to within those Terms of Use. You can see most or maybe all of the Foundation's policies . Our expectation is that communities will adhere to these policies whether or not such interventions occur. I understand that my responses have not been satisfactory, but they are as direct and explicit as I have been able to be. If you want to further explain the core issue, I'm open to hearing it, but I don't know what more there is for me to say about the Foundation's expectations. We ask every user to adhere to the Terms of Use, the Universal Code of Conduct, and local policies. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

And it is not clear at all what part of T&C banned users violated. By being stubborn about that you are just stoking the fires of rumors.

It is obvious that Foundation hopes that by being silent on this topic, people just will lose interest and go quiet.

very disappointed in WMF, which seems to became a machinery to silence dissent, because that what it looks like. If it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it must be a duck. Ђидо (talk) 15:13, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

At this stage, the issue goes beyond a single case and takes on a systemic character.

Based on the responses provided, it appears that large-scale interventions affecting core governance roles can occur without any meaningful public explanation, without observable criteria that would allow communities to anticipate such actions, and without a clear distinction between situations that should be handled locally and those that trigger direct Foundation intervention. Taken together, this begins to look not like a one-off measure, but like a de facto shift in the governance model, where key governance outcomes can be determined centrally without transparency to the communities.

Additionally, reducing synchronized cross-wiki activity to a “normal phenomenon” does not account for its timing and context: when a noticeable influx of contributors with administrative experience from closely related language projects coincides with an intervention and the weakening of local governance structures, it inevitably affects how content and discussions evolve within the project. In this context, it becomes difficult to view this as a neutral coincidence, and it creates the impression of coordinated external influence aimed at stabilizing or reshaping the project during a period when local governance mechanisms are weakened.

This, in turn, raises serious concerns for other large and sensitive projects — including Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, and Hebrew Wikipedias — which currently have no clear basis for assessing their own risks or understanding whether similar interventions and associated effects could apply to them.

If this interpretation is not accurate, then the Foundation needs to clearly articulate what limits, safeguards, and conditions exist to prevent such a perception of a shift in the governance model and potential coordination of external actors in similar situations. Iniquity (talk) 11:23, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't know how you come to the conclusion of "de facto shift in the governance model", both WMF Global Ban Policy and wmf:Policy:Wikimedia Foundation Office Actions Policy habe been in place for years and this is not the first time the WMF has taken action against multiple users with extended permissions, e.g. en:2021 Wikimedia Foundation actions on the Chinese Wikipedia, or en:2022 Wikimedia Foundation actions against MENA Wikipedians. Some issues simply can't be dealt with by using default community processes. Johannnes89 (talk) 06:50, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

However, this is first time that Wikimedia refuses to issue statement on what kind of violations they are punishing editors for. In all previous cases, WMF officials clarified what was the reason for bans, but in case of Serbian Wikipedia, they are refusing to provide that information, and just publishing bunch of whataboutisms.

• In 2021, en:2021 Wikimedia Foundation actions on the Chinese Wikipedia § Reactions:

The Foundation decided to take action after Maggie Dennis told the media that editors had tried to manipulate the content of articles as well as the election of administrators and that other editors had been physically harmed.

• Also in 2021, en:Croatian Wikipedia § Disinformation assessment by Wikimedia Foundation:

Wikimedia published a Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment, which was conducted by an external expert. The report concluded that "a group of Croatian language Wikipedia (Hr.WP) admins held undue de facto control over the project at least from 2011 to 2020. During that time, the group intentionally distorted the content presented in Croatian language Wikipedia articles in a way that matched the narratives of political organisations and groups that can broadly be defined as the Croatian radical right." According to the assessment, the administrators had abused their power to ban dissidents and selectively enforce and break rules, resulting in project capture

• In 2022, en:2022 Wikimedia Foundation actions against MENA Wikipedians:

The Wikimedia Foundation stated that the Wikipedians were engaged in conflict-of-interest propaganda, while the human rights organization Democracy for the Arab World Now accused the Wikipedians of being controlled by the government of Saudi Arabia, and the action was related to the sentencing of two Arabic Wikipedians to 32 and 8 years respectively in Saudi Arabia in 2020.

Ђидо (talk) 07:14, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Maggie wrote:

but it is not the first time that T&S has enforced group Office Actions impacting a specific language Wikipedia.

However, this is a first time I know that office actions were not explained in detailed public response. In 2021, you did three large office actions against contributors on three Wikipedia's, and for each you have provided public explanation what happened, what actions were taken, and why.

Ђидо (talk) 23:38, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Ђидо, I suspect there is a degree of misremembering the specificity of information that was shared. It is true that i sought permission in the 2021 case discussed here to talk broadly about the situation without detail or attribution to specific users, but I noted even then and there the limitations (see the second mini-FAQ.) Those limitations remain, and more than that the context of the world continues shifting. It is not the same legal and social environment in 2026 that it was even in 2021, when we were still unable to go into the level of detail the community preferred. This standard of non-disclosure has applied to our global bans since the very first one. As the Office Actions Policy notes, we do strive for transparency, which shows up more in content removals, where those are logged and explained. We are transparent in who is banned (the list is here with a link to the logs themselves), but we do not disclose why to the public. In 2021, it was judged safe to talk about the situation collectively. At this point, there are issues with doing so. That said, in 2021 we also had barely started the Case Review Committee, which does provide an element of appeal, so individuals who believe they were banned or warned in error generally have an avenue for additional review. In line with the evolution of that group's remit, if they are asked to review any eligible sanction related to that case, they will be evaluating the case entirely. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

As a Chinese Wikipedian I must say that in 2021 the Foundation did said what had happened, but what they've said was very vague and the community had no clue from the Foundation's announcements. We demanded for more information, but just like Ms. Dannis have said, they didn't (or couldn't) satisfy our demand. The community have guesses though. -- 魔琴 (talk) 20:56, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

P.S. The press industry also have their guesses. 魔琴 (talk) 20:59, 9 April 2026 (UTC)