Wikipedia:Community health initiative on English Wikipedia/Editing restrictions

The Wikimedia Foundation Anti-Harassment Tools team would like to build and improve tools to support the work done by contributors who set, monitor, and enforce editing restrictions on Wikipedia, as well as building systems that make it easier for users under a restriction to avoid the temptation of violating a sanction and remain constructive contributors.

On this page add ideas for tools that could make editing restriction more accurate and efficient.

Join us on the talk page to discuss the best solutions to build.

Background

Editing restrictions

Editing restrictions include several socially-enforced methods of limiting a disruptive users participation in certain areas of Wikipedia. Editing restrictions are an alternative to full site blocks from editing Wikipedia.

A list of types of editing restrictions on English Wikipedia can be found at Types of editing restrictions.

• Account restriction The user is limited to editing with a certain number of accounts (usually 1).
• Civility restriction The user may be sanctioned (including blocks) if they make any edits which are judged by an administrator to be uncivil, personal attacks, or assumptions of bad faith.
• Probation (supervised editing) The user on probation may be banned from pages that they edit in a certain way (usually disruptively) by an uninvolved administrator. Probation is usually used as an alternative to an outright topic ban in cases where the editor shows some promise of learning better behavior.
• Move ban The user is prohibited from directly moving (renaming) pages with the page move feature (sometimes only related to specific topics or namespaces).
• Revert restriction Usually, the user is limited to a certain number of reverts (usually 1) per page/topic per period of time (usually: 24 hours or 1 week) – exceptions, such as obvious vandalism, may apply. The user is additionally required to discuss any content reversions on the page's talk page.
• Topic ban The user is prohibited from editing either (1) any page (or section of a page) relating to a particular topic, (2) particular pages that are specified in the ban, and/or (3) making any edits in relation to a particular topic. Such a ban may include or exclude corresponding talk pages.
• Page/article ban. The user is prohibited from editing a specific page or set of pages specified in the ban. Such a ban may include or exclude corresponding talk pages.
• Interaction ban The user is prohibited from interacting with one or more users.

A list of currently enforced restrictions can be found at here.

Goals of editing restrictions

• Help users under a restriction avoid violating their sanction so they remain constructive Wikipedians.
• Help users who monitor restrictions make efficient, confident decisions.
• Provide tools that create an environment where users under an editing restriction are not villainized
• Provide more alternatives to full site blocks that can be used in dispute resolution.

Problems that software could potentially solve

• Editing restrictions can be easily violated which weakens the validity of sanctions if the edit goes unnoticed, or if noticed can require a time-consuming discussion.
• Monitoring for violations requires a specific knowledge of the restriction and how to respond.
• There is no technical barrier that reminds a user of their restrictions, which may lead to lapses in judgement when the temptation is too great.
• There may be other ways to sanction a user through software that currently don't exist as a socially-bound sanction.

Potential tools to support editing restrictions

Add your ideas below

Please suggest others ideas!

You can edit this page directly, suggest an idea on this talk page, or email us with alternative or additional suggestions on how the WMF's Anti-Harassment Tools team can build software to assist with enforcing editing restrictions.

User Interaction History Tool

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T166807

The User Interaction History tool is a proposed feature to help understand the sequence of events between two (and maybe more) users to provide better information to resolve a user conduct dispute. The tool could be used to compile evidence for a conduct dispute complaint about another user and Administrators could use the information to determine whether to in act or enforce editing restrictions.

There are volunteer-written features — Editor Interaction Analyser and WikiBlame to name two prominent tools — that facilitate this research but we believe there is room for improvement.

Pros and Cons

• Currently, users have to trudge through histories and diffs of multiple pages (articles, talk pages, user talk pages, noticeboards, special:contributions, etc.) to cobble together a timeline of events. There is often a lot of information to sift through and not all of it is actually useful. This tool could decrease the amount of time and effort required to investigate a conduct dispute.
• If dispute investigations take less effort and less time to reach a confident conclusion, fewer reports on AN/I would be ignored.
• This tool could allow users to monitor interaction bans more easily.

Page and category blocking

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T2674

This functionality was requested in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Moderation and admin tools#Enhanced per-user / per-article protection / blocking and Phabricator ticket T2674 has existed since 2005.

WikiConference North America 2017 discussion This topic was discussed at WikiConference North America 2017 in August 2017. Notes came be found here: etherpad

There are two types of bans that could be built into blocks: 

• Page bans are for a specific page (e.g. Paul_McCartney.) — We would allow admins to block users from specific pages (e.g. Paul_McCartney, User:Apples, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Foobar, etc.)
• Topic bans are for a range of pages (e.g. music, which would include the article page on Music as well as all other music related pages and categories. It's up to the admin's discretion.) — We would allows admins to block users from editing all pages within a category.

Setting a page or topic block would be restricted to only users with a new right (e.g. pageblock) which will be granted to administrators. Because this is closer to Special:Block in name and behavior than protection, we believe it should be tied to the user and therefore are planning to add this to Special:Block. Page and topic blocks will include standard block parameters: reason, expiration, talk and subpage inclusion, and autoblock IPs. Page or category blocks would be logged on the block log.

Pros and Cons

This feature would allow for simple restrictions to be set in simple circumstances. Category blocking is not a perfect 1:1 for topic bans due to the nature of "broadly construed" but this may still be a useful tool in some situations. Topic and page bans usually allow exceptions (to revert vandalism or remove BLP violations). Since this feature would be more restrictive, policy changes would be needed.

System to allow admins to display warnings to users when they attempt to edit restricted pages

As an alternate to outright prohibiting the editing of specific articles, we could build a system for admins to set warning messages that display to users when they open the editor (visual or wikitext) to remind them that they are under an editing restriction. This could be configured to a specific page or set of pages (e.g. display only on Paul_McCartney or all pages within Category:Music) or set to display on every edit session. Such a feature could also require the user to mark the warning as 'agreed' or 'understood.' This feature could be optional — a restricted user could opt-in to using this feature on their own accord.

Pros and Cons

This feature would allow the user to make constructive edits and may cover the "broadly construed" nature of topic bans. However, warning messages are not always effective deterrents and the user may grow blind to them over time.

Rate limiting/throttling of edits

Sometimes users get caught up in a debate and will reply quickly without self-moderating or taking time to consider the implications of their message. We could build a feature that would allow admins to set a limit to the amount a certain user may participate on a wiki. Examples include:

• Allow three edits to the FooBar article and/or talk page per day
• Allow three edits to the FooBar article and/or talk page per hour
• Allow ten edits to the entire wiki per day
• Require a ten-minute timeout between edits

The user would see an error when they attempted to edit in violation of this limit.

Pros and Cons

This could be an effective tool to allow users to calm down or thoughtfully consider what edits they will make. It doesn't entirely prohibit the user from participating on the wiki, it just slows them down.

Better review processes to see if a restricted user has violated their restriction

If users placed under restrictions were marked in the system, we could display this information in a few places. The first and simplest would be to build a log of edits made by restricted users, displaying what they are restricted from editing.

Similarly, we could add a message to the diff page for all edits made by a user under a restriction that says "User:Apples is under an editing restriction and are not allowed to edit about TOPIC. If this edit violates this restriction, please report it." This feature could be used by average users not aware of editing restrictions to help reduce the workload of admins. A similar feature could be built into the article creation review workflow.

Pros and Cons

The message on diff pages can be seen as shaming. Who would review the logs?

Your idea

Pros and Cons

Your idea

Pros and Cons

Your idea

Pros and Cons

Discuss on talk page

Please discuss these suggested types on the talk page