Chelsea Chiovelli (WMCA)

Hi again Chelsea Chiovelli (WMCA),

Re: Wikibooks:User_talk:Chelsea_Chiovelli_(WMCA)#Wikimedia_Canada_survey:

Yes it looks like I managed to confuse you, blocking is a complicated topic :-)

Let me try and explain some of the convoluted knowledge from the point of view of a non-admin that I have gathered over the years, which is still a long-shot from a total understanding:

• Blocking does not affect reading of pages (passive participation) on wmf-wikis. At least the reading of public pages in mainspace.
• Blocked users cannot "edit"/contribute (active participation). They are unable to edit or start new pages in Mainspace, participate in discussions on talkpages spaces (users' / articles') or ones in the Wikipedia/Wikibooks space (Village pumps / reading rooms etc)
  • The only exception is active participation on their own use-talk-page. Unless an admin has also blocked their user-talk-page access
• Blocked users cannot edit other specialized namespaces such as templates and categories.
• There are several degrees of blocking:
  • one can be blocked for a term (one day, one week, one month, etc..)
  • one can be blocked indefinetly (ENWP)
  • one can be blocked infinitly (META)
  • one's talkpage and email access can be disabled
• there are many reasons for blocking: vandalism, spamming, trolling, copyright infringement, LTAing(Long Term Abuse), socking, doxing, and many more.
• The most serious are blocks initiated by the Wikimedia Foundation that involve real life criminal activity (not sure about this one).
• Unfortunately few participants can tell the difference in degree and subject all Blockees to the same kind of harsh treatment:
• Users who are globally locked cannot even log in so are deprived of the personalized-pages that logged-in users can seen such as: Preferences and Watchlists. I suspect this is one of the reasons Globally locked users start sockpuppet accounts just so they can create watchlists, I speculate...

To answer your questions specifically: Since I am "only" locally blocked on ENWP / Simple and META (I am not globally locked, yet...:-) I can see all pages, but cannot contribute to those. 3 wikis. For example, I can check page histories of pages I had contributed to before I was blocked, but cannot participate in deletion discussions of those pages.

I hope I am making sense? Ottawahitech (talk) 23:50, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining! That does make sense. Chelsea Chiovelli (WMCA) (talk) 16:10, 22 April 2024 (UTC)