Wikipedia:Banning policy

The Wikipedia ban is a formal revocation of editing privileges on all or part of Wikipedia. A ban may be temporary and of fixed duration, or indefinite and potentially permanent. The standard invitation Wikipedia extends to "edit this page" does not apply to banned users.

Users are banned as an end result of the dispute resolution process, in response to serious cases of user misconduct.

While bans often apply to the entire project, partial bans are sometimes used when a user's disruptive activities are limited to a specific page or subject matter. For example, a user may be banned from the single article or an entire subject area. Users who violate partial bans are blocked temporarily to enforce the ban. Where appropriate, partial bans may extend to include talk pages.

Bans should not be confused with blocking, a technical mechanism used to prevent an account or IP address from editing Wikipedia. While blocks are one mechanism used to enforce bans, they are most frequently used to deal with vandalism and violations of the three-revert rule. Blocks are not the only mechanism used to enforce bans. A ban is a social construct and does not, in itself, physically prevent the user from editing any page.

Decision to ban

The decision to ban a user can arise from various sources:

1. The Wikipedia community, taking decisions according to appropriate community-designed policies with consensus support, or (more rarely) following consensus on the case itself. If not one out of 859 administrators is willing to unblock a user, the user can be considered banned.
2. The Arbitration Committee can use a ban as a remedy following a request for arbitration.
3. The Arbitration Committee may delegate the authority to ban a user. In the past it has done so using two mechanisms: Probation and Mentorship.
4. Jimbo Wales retains the authority to ban users.
5. The Wikimedia Foundation has the authority to ban users, though it has not exercised this authority on the English Wikipedia.

Community ban

There have been situations where a user has exhausted the community's patience to the point where he or she finds themselves indefinitely blocked by an administrator . . . and no one is willing to unblock them. Administrators who block in these cases should be sure that there is a consensus of community support for the block, and should submit the block for review at a relevant noticeboard. That it is a community ban should be noted in the block log, and the user should be listed on Wikipedia:List of banned users (under "Community"). Community bans must be supported by a strong consensus. The community may impose either topic bans or general editing bans.

Appeals process

Bans imposed by the community may be appealed to the Arbitration Committee. Banned users should not create sockpuppets to file an appeal. Rather, they should contact a member of the committee or an Arbitration clerk by email and ask that a request be filed on their behalf. Generally speaking, the banned user will make the request on his or her talk page, which will be copied to WP:RFAR by a clerk. In some cases, a banned user may be unblocked for the purpose of filing an appeal. In such cases, editing of unrelated pages is grounds for immediate re-blocking.

Users who have been banned indefinitely by the Arbitration Committee may appeal to the Committee after one year.

While any arbitration decision may be nominally appealed to Jimbo Wales or the Wikimedia Foundation, historically, neither has intervened.

Dealings with banned users

Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying."

Wikipedia's hope for banned users is that they will leave Wikipedia with their pride and dignity intact, whether permanently or for the duration of their ban. As such, it is inappropriate to bait banned users or take advantage of their ban to mock them.

Evasion and enforcement

Wikipedia's approach to enforcing bans balances a number of competing concerns:

• Maximizing the quality of the encyclopedia.
• Avoiding inconvenience or aggravation of any victims of mistaken identity.
• Maximizing the number of users who can edit Wikipedia.
• Avoiding conflict within the community over banned users.
• Dissuading or preventing banned users from editing Wikipedia.

As a result, enforcement has a number of aspects. As with enforcement of other Wikipedia policies, no individual editor is obligated to help enforce any ban.

Blocks

Except for partial bans, the primary account of any banned user is customarily blocked for the duration of the ban.

If the banned user creates sock puppet accounts to evade the ban, these may be blocked. When evasion is a problem, the IP address of a banned user who edits from a static IP address can also be blocked for the duration of the ban. When a banned user evades the ban from a range of addresses, short term IP blocks may be used. Typically, these last 24 hours.

Restart and extension of ban duration when evasion is attempted

It is customary for the "ban timer" to be reset or extended when a banned user attempts to edit in spite of the ban. No formal consideration is typically necessary. For example, if someone is banned for ten days, but on the sixth day attempts to evade the ban, then the ban timer will be reset from four more days remaining to ten days remaining. If the user doesn't subsequently evade his ban, it will last a total of sixteen days.

Enforcement by reverting edits

Any edits made in defiance of a ban may be reverted to enforce the ban, regardless of the merits of the edits themselves. As the banned user is not authorized to make those edits, there is no need to discuss them prior to reversion. Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating any edits made by banned users. Users that nonetheless reinstate such edits take responsibility for their content by so doing.

It is not possible to revert newly created pages, as there is nothing to revert to. Such pages may be speedily deleted. Any user can put a {{db-ban}} to mark such a page.

User pages

Banned users' user pages may be replaced by a notice of the ban and links to any applicable discussion or decision-making pages. The purpose of this notice is to announce the ban to editors encountering the banned user's edits. Unlike editors who have been temporarily blocked, banned users are not permitted to edit their user and user talk pages.

Other means

Serious, ongoing ban evasion is sometimes dealt with by technical means or by making an abuse complaint with the operator of the network from which the edits originate.

Reincarnations

A reincarnation occurs when a banned user returns to Wikipedia using another user name. Obvious reincarnations are easily dealt with—the account is blocked and contributions are reverted or deleted, as discussed above. See sock puppet for policy on dealing with unclear cases.

Scope and reciprocity

The English-language Wikipedia does not have authority over the Meta-Wiki, sister projects, or Wikipedias in languages other than English. As such, bans issued by the Wikipedia community or by the Arbitration Committee are not binding on other projects.

Reciprocal recognition of bans is an unsettled area of policy, in part because of the relative rarity of cases where banned users attempt to join another project.

See also

• Wikipedia:Blocking policy
• Wikipedia:Arbitration policy/Precedents
• Wikipedia:List of banned users
• CommunityExile and RightToLeave, from MeatballWiki
• Blacklist
• m:Ban coordination - coordination point for bans made on other WMF projects