Commons:Blockers

Blockers is a proposed user group on Commons intended to shorten response time to such abuses as sock puppetry and blatant copyright violations.

Technical

Blockers is a user group having the MediaWiki block right—or a similar one—on Wikimedia Commons. The block right gives a technical ability to block and unblock users, individual IP addresses and IP address ranges, but not to unblock self. It is traditionally considered as a part of the admin tools.

A user in the blockers group may be called a Blocker. Membership is granted by an Administrator via Commons:Requests for rights#Blocker.

If the future, a special restricted right may replace the generic block right to decrease impact of possible abuses or security breaches of blockers’ accounts. It may include such restrictions as:

• don’t unblock anything (except for lifting an own block),
• don’t block sysops,
• don’t block other blockers,
• no long-term blocks for IPs,
• don’t block “sufficiently trusted” accounts.

Policy

Blockers should be experienced members of the Commons community entrusted with the blocking tools by public consensus/vote. They must obey the blocking policy and follow prescribed procedures alongside administrators. Their main task is to defend Commons against the following abuses draining much resources from Commons’ administrators, namely:

• sock puppetry and block evasion,
• vandalism and spam-only contributions,
• blatant copyright violations by unresponsive users.

A blocker must understand what vandalism is and should be able to discern it from other kinds of objectionable edits or uploads. They also should be able to identify evident signs of abusing multiple accounts and block evasion and be familiar with sockpuppet investigations. An above-average understanding of other Commons’ policies is also expected from a blocker.

A blocker may and should also react to other kinds of policy violations, such as IP activity from open proxies or users who produce blatantly illegal content.

A blocker should refrain from blocks for reasons other than aforementioned obvious ones. Dealing with edit warring, personal attacks, breaches of overwriting policy, bad renaming requests, etc. should be left for administrators. In case of a serious disruption a blocker may issue a non-obvious block on their own responsibility, but must immediately report it to Commons: Administrators' noticeboard/Blocks and protections.

An administrator may overturn a blocker’s block (fully or partially) without prior consultation but, before doing it, must provide a posting explaining his/her action either on the target’s user_talk or the blocks and protections noticeboard.

A blocker may not use the privilege to remove (fully or partially) any block other than an own block.

Responsibility

Blockers are not administrators. They have no additional authority over deletion or keeping pages and files on Commons. They have, hence, no responsibility for anything hosted on Commons beyond responsibility of any registered user.

Failure to obey the policy is a ground for removal of the blocker privilege by a bureaucrat who should take the community opinion into account.