- The following is a proposed change to the MediaWiki software.
I don't know if something like this has already been proposed, but a brief search on my part didn't turn up something like this, so I will put forth my ideas. Here is my possible proposal, but I am going to give it here first just so we can discuss it and refine the idea beforehand. I would propose that we modify the MediaWiki software as to allow for specialized blocks. Blocks currently only have two options: a block on editing all pages except for a user's own talk page, or a block on all pages, including the user's own talk page. In my new "specialized" block system, there would be many more options.
- An administrator could block a user for disruption from editing either a specific, individual page, or the block could apply to a selection of pages. In cases where a user cannot be trusted to follow a topic-ban or does not feel that he/she can follow his/her restrictions, then an administrator could simply block that user from editing a list of manually selected pages which are "at risk".
- An administrator could block a user from editing all pages (minus manually chosen exceptions) that have a certain prefix. For example, if one user was being overly disruptive on SPI pages (and I am not talking about vandalism, then an administrator could block that user from editing all pages starting with "Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/".
- If there were situations where it was desired that an editor requesting an unblock edit one page apart from his/her talk page similar to this recent instance (but where the user could not be yet trusted to stay on only his/her talk page and the one exception page, then block could be modified to ignore that one page.