Wikivoyage:How to handle unwanted edits/Draft

User ban
It may occur that a contributor lets us know that they're not interested in our goals, and/or not interested in compromising or working with other Wikivoyagers to achieve those goals. If they insist on continuing to edit articles against the Terms of Use despite all our best efforts, we may resort to using a MediaWiki feature that bans that person's username or IP address from editing Wikivoyage.

If there is a need for a user ban, the user or IP address should be nominated for banning on User ban nominations, and also place a notice on the nominated User's Talk page. If the proposed ban is supported by two administrators, and there is a broad consensus for the block, after 3 days the ban will go into effect.

Bans made without a vote and without an understanding of the gravity of this action (and not covered by one of the exceptions listed below) are considered abuse by the administrator.

Exceptions to the user ban nomination process include:


 * Blocks of one day or less when used as a discretionary tool for administrators. These blocks are sometimes used in slowing high-volume unwanted edits or in getting the attention of a user who is editing in unwanted ways. In general such blocks should be applied for very short periods (two hours or less) and only increased in length if the unwanted edits persist.
 * Blocks of obvious vandals. An obvious vandal is someone who is clearly here to edit maliciously, such as those who add racial slurs to articles, individuals who add obscenities to multiple articles, or individuals with clearly malicious user names such as "User:I AM GOING TO VANDALIZE!!!!!" or "User X is a NAZI!!!!!!". Registered accounts of malicious editors may be blocked indefinitely, while IP addresses should be blocked for shorter periods, which can be successively increased if the malicious editing re-occurs.
 * Blocks of accounts which have clearly been established for the sole purpose of trolling. However, because the question of when a user's conduct crosses the line into trolling is quite subjective, this should only be considered an exception to the usual process in the most obvious of cases. If there's any doubt about the user's intentions, you should nominate the user at User ban nominations as usual.
 * Blocks of users or IP addresses that are blocked for vandalism or other malicious editing on other Wikimedia projects. If a user or IP address has been blocked on another Wikimedia project and makes a similar malicious edit on Wikivoyage, the same block settings that have been used on the other project may be applied here.
 * Blocks of automated spambot scripts. Automated scripts that add spam to Wikivoyage are typically blocked for a period of three months. Note that if the IP address being used for spam has also been used to make legitimate edits then a shorter block should be applied since some IP addresses are shared by large pools of users.
 * Blocks of Doppelgangers, which are user accounts meant to mimic another account for the purposes of causing confusion. For example, "Joel" and "JoeI" look the same, but the second version uses a capital "i" instead of a lowercase "L".  Doppleganger accounts may be permanently blocked without any need for a ban nomination.
 * Blocks of user accounts created by spambots. Some of the more advanced spambots are actually capable of creating user accounts.  These accounts should be permanently blocked as soon as they are identified as being spambot accounts.

If there is any doubt as to whether a nomination is needed before blocking a user, admins should err on the side of caution and add a nomination to the Project:User ban nominations page.