On 7/31/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/31/07, John Lee johnleemk@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.)