User:Jack who built the house/Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Anti-harassment

Anti-harassment

0 proposals, 0 contributors

Partial block of IPs across categories

Problem: Editors evading a block/ban often go to the dynamic IP route to continue editing. Sometimes it is not possible to rangeblock that IP across the whole of WP due to collateral damage of blocking good editors.
Who would benefit: Anyone who has suffered harassment/hounding/stalking from an IP that continues to pop-up day after day.
Proposed solution: Partial blocks should be allowed across a group of categories for a range of IP addresses. For example, blocking range 123.245/ across Category:Black English sportspeople. I've raised this before at WP:VPT, with a reply stating that an article could be removed from the category, and the block wouldn't work. But once the block is in place, then the IP could not edit the page(s) in question to circumvent the partial block. Thanks.
More comments:
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Lugnuts (talk) 08:24, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

It's also possible that such a feature would be used to provide technical implementations of topic bans, though I think on the English Wikipedia there might be disagreement to such an idea. In the IP case, how will this work under the new system of IP addresses being replaced with identifiers (see en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-11-01/Op-Ed)? I'd be worried about a tool that relies on the current system of rangeblocks if this may change soon. — Bilorv (talk) 17:42, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
One major concern raised when this was mooted on en-wiki was that articles could be added to a category incorrectly (including wilfully incorrectly) to cause problems for the user. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:43, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
A reply added using Convenient Discussions. Jack who built the house (talk) 19:40, 18 November 2020 (UTC)