Oh yes, the Unblock mailing list has given me an interesting view on the interaction between newbies and admins who regularly block users ('Wikipedia says I was blocked for "user." What the heck is that and why I am being blocked?' is a fairly common complaint, along with the usual autoblocks and AOL collateral damage). I've also noted that most of us replying on the Unblock mailing list have used "customer service" language to a high degree.
On 9/5/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Ah, a great example of something where both policy and its practical implimentation are biting newbies.
At unblock-en-l we are getting a slow but steady stream of unblock requests (a few a week) of people who were username blocked. In most cases they don't understand why, because there wasn't nearly enough information left on their talk page at block time and there was no polite discussion prior to the block informing them of the policy and asking them to chose another name and use the name-shift functions to switch to it.
As a general rule, I think that unblock-en-l is getting an interesting view into newbie interactions with Wikipedia. One thing that concerns me is that it's hard to tell what fraction of people who should contact unblock-en-l actually do, as opposed to just walking away from the project. That could be a very high ratio and as far as I know we have no way to tell what it is.
If we exclude the well-known, work-in-progress AOL block problem, we see a slow steady stream of problem editors complaining about their latest block, innocent people caught in autoblocks on shared IP space, people who didn't think 3RR applied to them or didn't understand 3RR, and other minor issues.
The problem users are not particularly a problem worth otherwise addressing.
People caught in autoblocks on shared IP space seems to be high enough volume to be a potential real problem.
People who don't understand 3RR seems to be a possible big deal. It also comes up a few times a week. We may have a communications issue telling new users about it...