In thinking about the recent Hasbara Fellowships situation, it reminds me of previous situations where we've made summary blocks, like the US Congress IPs. I'm wondering if we could use another tool in our toolbox: the ability to ban people from articles only, while letting them contribute normally to article talk and other pages. Here's why: Wikipedia is becoming a bigger and bigger target for people with strong points of view. A lot of these are people with conflicts of interest, and another big segment is those engaged in political battles. Turned loose on the encyclopedia, they could (and would) substantially harm our NPOV goal. Right now, we have two options to deal with them. One is to trust that our system is robust enough to keep POVs roughly balanced. The other is to just ban people outright from participation, temporarily or permanently. For these strong POV types, I don't see either one of those as a great solution. Even when we can distill POV contributions into NPOV articles, POV pushers are wearying. Blocking them can help, but it gives them an incentive to pop up elsewhere, leading to sock-puppet hunts and a lot of admin whack-a-mole. More importantly, it deprives us of their help in providing references and in spotting POV distortion from others. Would it be worth creating a new, more limited kind of block, where they are just forbidden to touch main-space article pages? If they were complete jerks, we could still use a normal block, of course. But creating the softer option of semi-protection worked well, and I'm thinking a softer kind of block would be a similar step forward. William -- William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri