The anti-harassment tools team has been making improvements to the blocking tools. This year we have introduced partial blocks, which allow the blocking of a user or IP from individual pages or namespaces. The tool is already in use on a number of Wikipedias, and will be rolled out to more in the coming months. We will introduce the partial blocking tool and briefly mention some of the technical challenges that this project involved, as well as some of the more general improvements to blocking that we have been making along the way. We will then open up the discussion to the room. We would like to talk about the social implications of making technical changes to our blocking tools and the role of blocking as one of our front-line tools to preserve safety in the community.
Speakers: Thalia Chan