[WikiEN-l] Blocking for article pages only?

[William Pietri]

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 at scissor.com>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_Pietri