[WikiEN-l] Blocking for article pages only?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/31/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is one of the older ideas that's been drifting around WP for years.
> Trouble is, we don't have the developers to work on this problem. This isn't
> like policy; we can't be bold and write it. Oh, technically we can, except
> most of us lack the technical prowess to do it, and those who have it are
> already working on MediaWiki.
>
> FWIW, though, (which may not be very much), I completely support this idea.
> It's a real necessity.


Ehhh. That would not be a technically challenging feature, just like
blocking of upload only. But it's not a good idea.

We block accounts and IPs that are unable or are unwilling to control
themselves and behave in a productive manner.

If someone is enough of a harm to justify a technical block from "X"
then they really should be blocked completely.  We are not so short on
people that we should be accepting harmful folks and trying to limit
them technically to the spaces where they will only do the least harm.
... Harmful users should be blocked.

On commons I setup a kludgy form of upload only blocking, the
justification being that most commons users don't spend enough time on
commons to see talk page notes plus it may not be obvious what
language the user speaks, so getting someone's attention and
communicating can be much harder there.  Even there the upload
blocking is pretty much never used.  If the kludgy upload-only
blocking solution on commons was found to be useful in practice we'd
have an argument there for full support in MediaWiki, but it isn't so
we do not have a good argument for it.

I really expect the same would be true for other forms of fancy
blocking for enwiki.