[WikiEN-l] Blocking for article pages only?

[George Herbert]

On 7/31/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't know... there are people who have valid points, who are just
chronically unable to keep from making improper article edits if they
have edit permission.

There have been a number of Arbcom "can't edit the article but can
edit the talk page" rulings over the years.

A technical enforcement for that might be nice.

A generalized ACL mechanism in Mediawiki, now... *drool*...

(yes, I know.  I know PHP.  I might have to develop it myself.)


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com