Wikipedia:Banning policy

This page documents an English Wikipedia policy.

It describes a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

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[[:|WP:BAN WP:BANPOL]]

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 may be banned as a result of the dispute resolution process.

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 a 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.

Banning 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 often 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, disable a user's ability to edit any page.

Decision to ban

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

The Wikipedia community, making decisions according to appropriate community-designed policies with consensus support, or (more rarely) following consensus on the case itself. If no administrator proposes unblocking a user, and the block has received due consideration by the community, the user is considered banned.
The Arbitration Committee can use a ban as a remedy usually following a request for arbitration. In the past these bans have nearly always been of limited duration, with a maximum of one year.
The Arbitration Committee may delegate the authority to ban a user. In the past it has done so using two mechanisms: Probation and Mentorship.
Jimbo Wales retains the authority to ban users.
The Wikimedia Foundation has the authority to ban users, though it has not often 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 has been blocked long term, usually indefinitely, and there is no longer any administrator who proposes unblocking them. Such users may have been blocked as a result of the blocking policy, or the community may have discussed their behaviour on a relevant noticeboard such as the administrators' noticeboard or the past noticeboard community sanction noticeboard (which was created for such purpose), and reached a consensus not to unblock the user. When discussions fail to achieve a consensus due to disagreement amongst administrators, the cases are referred to the Arbitration Committee. Users who remain indefinitely blocked after due consideration by the community are considered "banned by the Wikipedia community" and listed on Wikipedia:List of banned users.

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 Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration 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

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.

Editing on behalf of banned users

Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying," unless they are able to confirm that the changes are verifiable and have independent reasons for making 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 to 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 usually will 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 the ban, the total duration is thus 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 edits made by banned users. Users who reinstate such edits take complete responsibility for the 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-banned}} 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

Banned users sometimes return 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.

Outside influence

Attempts to coerce actions of users through threats of actions outside the Wikipedia processes, whether onsite or offsite, are grounds for immediate banning.

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.