[WikiEN-l] Blocked - In violation of the Wikipedia blocking policy

Paul Rynne PaulRynne at iol.ie
Tue Oct 25 00:18:55 UTC 2005


Hi,

When attempting to edit a page in Wikipedia, I encountered the following 
message:

Your user name or IP address has been blocked 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy> by Jtdirl 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jtdirl>.

The reason given is:
/on the evidence almost certainly Skyring
/

*Your IP address is 213.202.191.123. Please include this address, along 
with your username, in any queries you make.
*

(First up, I have no idea who or what "Skyring" is, much less why I 
should be blocked as a result)

This block is a violation of the Wikipedia blocking policy which stated 
that it should take place in the case of  "vandalism, bots, personal 
attacks". I engaged in no such activity.

In addition, I discovered that the pages I had edited (a grand total of 
5 edits EVER), had all been reverted. These edits were all minor and 
were intended to either edit, correct mistakes or badly worded entries. 
For example, in the "Demographics" section of the "Republic of Ireland" 
section, the last paragraph contains some dubious comments about 
immigrants into the Republic of Ireland. I edited this because the 
comments as they: a) ignore the largest EU immigrant community in the 
Republic (the British), and instead mentions the smaller numbers of 
Poles and Latvians (It also speculates inappropriately on the reasons 
that have chosen to immigrate), and; b) mentions various African 
nationalities under "Other nationalities" while ignoring larger less 
visible (non-EU) groupings such as Americans and Canadians!

The "blocking" policy as used by user Jtdirl might more accurately be 
labelled a censorship policy as it is clearly intended to prevent 
editing of inaccurate entries. I would strongly suggest you come up with 
a better policy to police who can block people and review when and why 
they do so.

Paul






More information about the WikiEN-l mailing list