Wikipedia talk:Banning policy

Can users request and receive interaction bans?

Suppose that user A regularly makes posts on user B's talk page and elsewhere in response to their comments. User B does not engage with user A.

If user B requested an interaction ban, under what circumstances could they receive that and have it enforced? Is it trivial for a user to say "Please do not contact me" and then actually get protection from being contacted, or is it a big deal to be granted an interaction ban?

I have the idea that there are lots of cases in Wikipedia where one user wishes to not receive messages from another, but I do not see much documentation about this at Wikipedia:Banning_policy#Interaction_ban.

Are there good reasons to compel users to receive talk page messages from users whom they tell to quit contacting them? Bluerasberry (talk) 16:54, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

• My 2c. Generally, if an editor asks someone to stop interacting with them, and the request is reasonable, it is expected the person will honor it insofar as they can. If they fail to, in a way that is disruptive to the project (WP:DE), then at ANI or AN, the community can impose an interaction ban. Arb can as well, and theoretically admin can in contentious topics but generally, it is the community that imposes it IF the interaction becomes disruptive. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 03:50, 19 November 2025 (UTC)

@Dennis Brown: To me that seems reasonable.

I know that all amendments here are to be discussed and wordsmithed, but I gave a go at editing this at special:diff/1323895006/1325352876.

My intent here is to match our practice with interaction bans with what other social media websites would call "blocking other users", which is a common and well understood feature in popular platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. I am aware that Wikipedia uses the word "block" in a different way, as Wikipedia:Blocking policy prevents people from editing Wikipedia and is not designed to prevent user interaction. The meta:Community Wishlist has explored some blocking processes but I do not think those ever matched with what is here called interaction bans, and which is close to the spirit of what many other platforms call user blocking.

The end result that I want is preventing what I think is a common situation, of one user wishing to prevent 1 or a small number of other users from directly, personally, communicating with them on Wikipedia. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:58, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I don't think it is actually that common, but I have no problem defining a bit in policy. There are always exceptions, like necessary notifications, that would not be breaching a request to be left alone. This could include ANI, AFD, as well as automated notifications. These are rare, but every admin understands it is an exception to any interaction ban. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 05:30, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

§ Community bans: Change a sentence from present to future?

The passage shown below confused me when I read it for the first time. I'm a new editor, though, so I don't just want to edit a policy. I think it might be good to change this:

If the discussion appears to have reached a consensus for a particular sanction, an uninvolved administrator closes the discussion, notifies the subject accordingly, and enacts any blocks called for.

to this, changing from present tense to future:

If the discussion appears to have reached a consensus for a particular sanction, an uninvolved administrator should close the discussion, notify the subject accordingly, and enact any blocks called for.

Hope someone can comment. I can see how it works in the present, but I still found it confusing the first time I read through, so a simply change like this might help someone else. Thanks. Rockethead293 (talk) 16:08, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

On a grammatical note, shifting to the future tense requires something like "will close", not "should close". Within the context of the paragraph (located in Wikipedia:Banning policy § Community bans and restrictions), because the rest of the paragraph is written as instructions to the closer in the present tense, I think keeping the actions in the present tense to match would be better. Instead, the tense of the if clause could be moved to the past tense, such as: "If the discussion has reached a consensus for a particular sanction..." isaacl (talk) 17:40, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Okay, something like this, then? (Hope I understood the meaning of your message.)

If the discussion has reached a consensus for a particular sanction, an uninvolved administrator closes the discussion, notifies the subject accordingly, and enacts any blocks called for.

Changing "appears to have reached" to "has reached" (which, I think, could subtly change meaning?), but leaving everything else as it is.

Otherwise, I'm okay with how it is right now.

Rockethead293 (talk) 20:55, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

The sentence is eliding steps for conciseness, which leads to its somewhat convoluted start. The result of a discussion is only known once someone has evaluated it, which is generally considered part of closing a discussion. My suggestion is to simplify the sentence by explicitly only covering the case where consensus has been established for a sanction. isaacl (talk) 02:15, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

• My 2¢ says the current version is fine as is. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 00:52, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Alright, this has been open for about 24 hours. I'll leave as-is. Thanks, folks. Rockethead293 (talk) 16:30, 21 November 2025 (UTC)

Ban vs block

What is the difference between a block and a ban? It seems unclear to me whether it is for repeated offenses or typically from Wikipedia foundation or arbitration?Wikbehere (talk) 22:15, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Please see WP:BLOCKBANDIFF. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:29, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. Is it okay to put the link somewhere where it isn’t disruptive. Wikbehere (talk) 02:33, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Sure, it would be fine to link to that somewhere. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:03, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Ban from reading?

I've always been idly curious if it's possible for a human person to be banned not just from editing the Wikipedia but also reading it, and if so how. —Hâlian the Protogen (^Beep! ⁄ _Boop!) 14:21, 26 June 2026 (UTC)

There's no need, but also no possible way, for us to do that. We have released all our content under CC BY 4.0 so that they're freely available. 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 15:02, 26 June 2026 (UTC)

Well, there's no way to ban someone from reading the text of Wikipedia, yes. But some related things are possible:

• It's possible to configure an account's user rights such that it can't read any pages. We don't currently have any situation where it's authorized, but the technical infrastructure is there. Whether the global community would allow a wiki to do that would probably depend on the circumstance; doing it solely out of spite would certainly go against Wikimedia values.
• It's possible to use JavaScript to make an account unable to read pages. Some interface administrators have done this in the past; my understanding is it's generally seen as abuse of the tool and would likely be overruled at the global level even if there were local consensus for it.
• System administrators are able to ban an IP address from accessing Wikimedia servers at all. Unlike the previous two hypotheticals, this one actually does happen, although it's not for the usual kind of thing people get banned for. Generally it's for gross API abuse.
• The Wikimedia Foundation has the legal authority to ban someone from interacting with Wikimedia servers from any IP address; in theory this is legally enforceable even if they don't enforce it with IP bans. However, to my knowledge, the current implementation of Wikimedia Foundation bans does not do this. I don't know if there are special cases where the WMF has gone an extra step and done that, but the ban messages I've seen have not extended to reading.

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 15:06, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Scope of topic bans in terms of page types

I was about to post a notice about a user at ANI for ongoing topic ban violations but noticed an ambiguity while gathering up information for the report. The definition of a topic ban implies that a ban on a topic is inherently a ban on related edits or discussions anywhere on Wikipedia.

I was tipped off about the situation when I saw that another user had reverted this user's edit at Talk:Proto-Turkic language with the edit summary Topic ban violation I noticed that this user has made numerous edits in the areas covered by the ban since the ban was enacted. However, I discovered that the TBANned user had previously inquired at User talk:Toadspike/Archive 7#Querry as to whether their particular ban applied to talk pages as well. Toadspike replied The topic ban says "articles", so I don't think it applies to talk pages. Indeed, the ban says indefinitely topic banned from Central Asian, Iranic, Turkic, Armenian, and Caucasus articles [emphasis mine]. Subsequently, most (though not all—this may still be a reportable TBAN breach) of this user's edits have been to talk pages of articles covered by the ban.

So, do TBANs, including this one, always applied to everything, with the wording of this one restricting the ban to articles being a misstatement of the situation, or does this TBAN genuinely apply to articles only? Largoplazo (talk) 16:14, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

The "default" is that tbans apply to all namespaces, but they can also be made explicitly narrower in specific cases. I don't know anything about this particular case, so you would probably need to ask the admin who enacted it. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:52, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I was asking the general question, in part to see if the admin's understanding was correct, so asking the admin whether the admin was correct wouldn't be helpful. Largoplazo (talk) 21:31, 12 July 2026 (UTC)