The Community health initiative is starting a project to measure the effectiveness of blocks. The first step is to discuss with the wikimedia community ideas about how to do it. To that end, the Anti-Harassment Tools team and Morten Warncke-Wang have created space to discuss research ideas about user blocks.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_health_initiative/Measuring_the_ef...
AHT is particularly interested to learn whether the new partial blocks feature is successful as a ''tool or instrument''. Therefore, the first part of this research will mainly focused on the short term gains in the utility of partial blocks in order to understand whether it appears to be working and if there appears to be a need for changes. These measurements will provide us with insight quickly. Currently there is not much known about how sitewide blocks affect users. This makes a comparison of the effects of the new partial block feature to sitewide blocks difficult. To provide all of us with some insight, the Anti-Harassment Tools team would like to examine historical block data across wikimedia projects to establish a baseline.
However, our list of measurements that we propose has a lot of longer term ones, e.g. surveys. These are important and should be considered to be implemented later, because they can provide all of us with insight that is otherwise hidden.
Please on wiki to discuss these ideas and your ideas.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative/Measuring_t...
For the Anti-Harassment Tools team and [[User:MWang (WMF)|Morten Warncke-Wang]].
Sydney Poore