Yesterday I was on a conference call that included several Nigerian
Wikipedians, I was surprised at how much of their problems editing
Wikipedia were over blocks.
The English language Wikipedia doesn't have an overall problem with editing
numbers, nearly eight years on, editing volumes are still clearly above the
2014 minima. But we do have huge geographic skews and in particular we
badly underrepresent the English speaking parts of Africa in our community
and in our Projects. I don't know if other languages have similar issues,
but it would not surprise me.
I get that lowering our guard overall against IP vandals would increase the
workload of those who'd rather be improving Wikipedia than clearing up
after vandals. But there are a couple of things that could fairly easily
be done if we want a more global community.
Firstly, unblock IPs that geolocate to countries where we lack
contributors.Yes we will get more vandalism in those countries, but far far
less than if we also unblocked all IPs in countries where we have lots of
editors.
Secondly, implement "smart blocking", especially with range bocks. Yes
there will still be lots of collateral damage where someone in the same
range has the same sort of device/, O/S etc as the person who did the edit
that prompted the block. But anyone in the same range who uses a different
type of hardware operating system etc would not be caught by a smart block.
Thirdly, especially if we can't do the first two, be more liberal with IP
block exemption for accounts in countries where we lack editors and have
problems with a limited number of often blocked IPs.
WSC
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