Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2010-01/New blocking policy

The objective of the blocking policy should be to get as little vandalism as possible. What's the effect of blocking? For simple errors, blocking may discourage new contributors. This is not the objective. On the other hand, true vandals expect to be blocked, they are often disappointed when they are reverted without any message and without any block, because theit usual motivation is to be noticed as much as possible, to disrupt as much as possible. If they feel they are ignored, most get discouraged. This is the objective. Therefore, I would propose the following policy:

• first offenses: revert and no other action if bad faith is obvious; revert and leave a message providing advice if good faith can be assumed
• if the offender insists too much, leave a very short message (as short as possible, e.g. Please stop, it's no use.)
• if the offender insists further, and if the situation cannot be controlled in another way, revert + block (with no additional message, vandals should be ignored as much as possible to get discouraged). It's only in this case that the blocking policy proposed should apply.

Lmaltier 12:01, 30 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

I agree that would be the best possible course of action. Unfortunately, most people don't see it that way, and a vote to get that in place as a policy would likely fail. --Yair rand 00:23, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think it is more likely for a kind of one-strike system to be voted in where the user gets one chance, and if he blows it, he gets blocked....that is the kind of blocking system that I can see being utilized in the future. Razorflame 00:24, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

I know that, currently, most people probably don't feel this way. But, if they look at it from a "psychology" point of view, I think that most people would agree. Lmaltier 08:17, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

For simple errors, yes, what you say is good (and is what is done, I think). It just does not apply to all more general cases. A user who is adding porn to other users' talk pages is not going to be deterred by reversion (nor for that matter will a message do anything). A user who is going around adding "Fuck your Mum!" to every page in sight, again, probably won't even notice if you revert everything they've done; they might stop if you give them a message, but more likely they'll just replace what you wrote with "Fuck <your name>'s Mum!". There is absolutely no need to mollycoddle everyone. Please don't make the mistake of thinking our patrollers are deliberately malicious, they deal with users as described here, and elsewhere, far too frequently to waste time over them; instant blocking is the only thing that works in some cases. There is a line to be drawn between non-blocking and blocking, but, if it were to be explicitly stated, the intelligent vandal would simply do everything exactly on the "it's ok" side of the line, it must remain a subjective process, and we rely on the experience of our patrollers to get this right. With patrolling comes not only experience but cynicism; that is a problem, but one I see no solution to. Conrad.Irwin 11:33, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

The example you give is the last case I describe. In this case, I agree that blocking is the only possible course of action. But this is not the most common case. In most cases, blocking is counterproductive. Lmaltier 11:54, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

Re: "With patrolling comes not only experience but cynicism; that is a problem, but one I see no solution to": Very true, and well put. —Ruakh_TALK 22:52, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

I agree, there are essentially three types of vandalism

1. Good faith bad edits
2. Gibberish/nonsense
3. Insults, attack pages etc.

In the first case, it's best to revert and explain why (too encyclopedic, etc.) The second case, just revert and move on. In the third case, you may as well block as it's clear enough that the user has no interest in adding good content here, so should be blocked.

Blocking can be counterproductive because the time it takes to block someone could be used to revert some more bad edits. But if someone vandalises 5 pages in 5 minutes, you absolutely have to block. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:38, 31 January 2010 (UTC)Reply