Help:Blocking

These are guidelines concerning the blocking policy.

There is deliberately no hard-and-fast rule about what is considered to hinder or harm our progress. Clear examples of such behaviour include:

• Deliberately harming our content by deleting useful things or adding useless content or pages.
• Persistently wasting other editors’ time by making many edits that have to be undone, cleaned up, or otherwise modified to make them correct.
• Causing our editors distress by directly insulting them or by being continually impolite towards them.

There are few other means of protecting Wiktionary; the most obvious is by discussion on the users’ talk pages. Some effort should be made to explain to people why their edits are considered incorrect, however a short block can be given if they clearly won’t listen. In cases where a user has had something explained to them, an explicit warning should be given to them before blocking them; this can show that they have no intention of mending their ways.

When patrolling recent changes, it is likely you will want to block some users instantly, normally when they clearly have no intent to be productive.

Particularly:

• Those editing apparently for the primary purpose of adding offensive or promotional material.
• People making many bad edits in short order.
• Accounts with usernames that are offensive, similar to established accounts’, or promotional.

However, there are people who make innocent mistakes; they should not be blocked instantly:

• People making one or two unhelpful edits.
• Those adding protologisms, or Wikipedia-style articles.

Such an account can be blocked if its principal ignores a single request to desist or explanation of what he is doing wrong.

It is rare, but occasionally there will be a seasoned contributor, even an administrator, who is causing trouble; such cases must be handled with diplomacy. It is not acceptable to block a whitelisted user or an administrator unless they already know they will be blocked for their actions. In most cases they will not know they will be blocked unless they have received an explicit warning or are deliberately and maliciously ignoring current practice.

For anonymous IP addresses, the 99% case is non-recurring stupidity. Don’t waste your time doing research on the IP if the IP has not been blocked before: block one day, anon-users/prevent-creation only. If it recurs (block log has entries), then look closer:

See Wiktionary:Range blocks for when and how to block a range of IP addresses.

• Wiktionary:Vandalism in progress (WT:VIP) for currently occurring or very recent vandalism
• Wiktionary:Vandalism (or WT:VANDAL) for vandalism of Wiktionary in general