Help:Blocking

These are guidelines concerning the blocking policy.

Guidelines

Blockable offenses

There is deliberately no hard-and-fast rule about what is considered to hinder or harm our progress. Clear examples of such behaviour include:

Deliberately harming our content by deleting useful things or adding useless content or pages.
Persistently wasting other editors’ time by making many edits that have to be undone, cleaned up, or otherwise modified to make them correct.
Causing our editors distress by directly insulting them or by being continually impolite towards them.

Alternatives

There are few other means of protecting Wiktionary; the most obvious is by discussion on the users’ talk pages. Some effort should be made to explain to people why their edits are considered incorrect, however a short block can be given if they clearly won’t listen. In cases where a user has had something explained to them, an explicit warning should be given to them before blocking them; this can show that they have no intention of mending their ways.

Patrolling

See also: Help:Patrolled edits

When patrolling recent changes, it is likely you will want to block some users instantly, normally when they clearly have no intent to be productive.

Particularly:

Those editing apparently for the primary purpose of adding offensive or promotional material.
People making many bad edits in short order.
Accounts with usernames that are offensive, similar to established accounts’, or promotional.

However, there are people who make innocent mistakes; they should not be blocked instantly:

People making one or two unhelpful edits.
Those adding protologisms, or Wikipedia-style articles.

Such an account can be blocked if its principal ignores a single request to desist or explanation of what he is doing wrong.

Tricky issues

It is rare, but occasionally there will be a seasoned contributor, even an administrator, who is causing trouble; such cases must be handled with diplomacy. It is not acceptable to block a whitelisted user or an administrator unless they already know they will be blocked for their actions. In most cases they will not know they will be blocked unless they have received an explicit warning or are deliberately and maliciously ignoring current practice.

Block length

Logged in accounts:		Anonymous editors only	Prevent account creation
infinite	Blatant or confirmed sockpuppets created for the purpose of vandalism or block evasion. Abuse, plagiarism, persona non grata type blocks, based on community consensus. Bad username accounts, including: email addresses, exploitative names, copycats, offensive names, etc. Checkuser identified bad sockpuppets.	N/A	N/A
> 1 month	Third blocks for persistent or repeat offenders.	N/A	N/A
7-31 days	Second blocks for persistent or repeat offenders.	N/A	N/A
1-7 days	Primary blocks for behavior which is counter to policy, productivity or community.	N/A	N/A
1/4-24 hours	These blocks should rarely be given out, but if attempts to communicate with another community member fail, a very short term block can be issued.	N/A	N/A

For anonymous IP addresses, the 99% case is non-recurring stupidity. Don’t waste your time doing research on the IP if the IP has not been blocked before: block one day, anon-users/prevent-creation only. If it recurs (block log has entries), then look closer:

Anonymous contributors: static or semi-static vs. dynamic IPs		Anonymous editors only	Prevent account creation
infinite	Open proxies and zombies only! no other IPs should be permanently blocked.	NO!	YES!
> 1 month	IPs which have been blocked for shorter durations before, and have returned: probable static IPs.	No	YES
7-31 days	Vandalism which would be blocked for this duration on a registered account, on what is probably a static IP.	No	Yes
1-7 days	Most anonymous vandalism which is from DSL/Cable ISP (SBC/Comcast/RR) IPs.	Yes	Yes
.25-24 hours	Large ISP (AOL/BT) IPs engaged in any sort of vandalism.	Yes	No

Range blocks

See Wiktionary:Range blocks for when and how to block a range of IP addresses.