[WikiEN-l] Re: "block" considered too harsh a word?

Tue May 10 17:39:19 UTC 2005

If it is only for a day or two, 'Time Out' with an explanation might do the 
job. 

Timwi writes: 

> 
> As we have seen numerous times in the past, users who are new to the 
> Wikipedia tend to vastly overreact to being blocked. Some people throw 
> quite a fit even when they're blocked for a mere 24 hours. 
> 
> A friend of mine suggested that perhaps the word should be changed to 
> something more euphemistic and something less harsh than "block". I can 
> sympathise with this thinking, because if I saw a page telling me I'm 
> "blocked", not knowing what it means I would probably interpret it to mean 
> "blocked indefinitely", and as we know people don't tend to read the 
> entire message and hence don't notice where it mentions the time limit. 
> 
> Unfortunately, he didn't have any ideas what to call it instead. So I'm 
> wondering what everyone else here thinks? 
> 
> 