A Wikipedia ban is a formal revocation of editing privileges on all or part of Wikipedia. A ban may be temporary and of fixed duration, or indefinite and potentially permanent. The standard invitations Wikipedia extends to over six billion people worldwide to "edit this page" do not apply to banned users.

Users are banned as an end result of the dispute resolution process, in response to serious cases of user misconduct.

While bans often apply to the entire project, partial bans are sometimes used when a user's disruptive activities are limited to a specific page or subject matter. For example, a user may be banned from the single article or an entire subject area. Users who violate partial bans are blocked temporarily to enforce the ban. Partial bans usually do not extend to talk pages.

Bans should not be confused with blocking, a technical mechanism used to prevent an account or IP address from editing Wikipedia. While blocks are one mechanism used to enforce bans, they are most frequently used to deal with vandalism and violations of the three-revert rule. Blocks are not the only mechanism used to enforce bans. A ban is a social construct and does not, in itself, physically prevent the user from editing any page.

The decision to ban a user can arise from four places. Bans from all places are equally legitimate.

1. The Wikipedia community, taking decisions according to appropriate community-designed policies with consensus support, or (more rarely) following consensus on the case itself.
2. The Arbitration Committee can use a ban as a remedy following a request for arbitration.
   • The Committee may delegate the authority to ban a user. In the past it has done so using two mechanisms: Probation and Mentorship.
3. Jimbo Wales retains the authority to ban users.
4. The Wikimedia Foundation has the authority to ban users, though it has not exercised this authority on the English Wikipedia.

Bans imposed by the community may be appealed to the Arbitration Committee.

Users who have been banned indefinitely may, if they wish, appeal to the Arbitration Committee after one year.

While any arbitration decision may be nominally be appealed to Jimbo Wales or the Wikimedia Foundation, historically neither has intervened.

Wikipedians are not permitted to post or edit material at the direction of a banned user, an activity sometimes called "proxying."

Wikipedia's hope for banned users is that they will leave Wikipedia with their pride and dignity intact, whether permanently or for the duration of their ban. As such, it is inappropriate to bait banned users or take advantage of their ban to mock them.

Wikipedia's approach to enforcing bans balances a number of competing concerns:

• Maximising the quality of the encyclopedia.
• Avoiding inconvenience or aggravation of any victims of mistaken identity.
• Maximising the number of users who can edit Wikipedia.
• Avoiding conflict within the community over banned users
• Dissuading or preventing banned users from editing Wikipedia.

As a result, enforcement has a number of aspects. As with enforcement of other Wikipedia policies, no individual editor is obligated to help enforce any ban.

• Blocks

The primary account of any banned user is cusomarily blocked for the duration of the ban.

If the banned user creates sock puppet accounts to evade the ban, these may also be blocked. When evasion is a problem, the IP address of a banned user who edits from a static IP address can also be blocked for the duration of the ban. When a banned user evades the ban from a range of addresses, short term IP blocks may be used. Typically, these last 24 hours.

• Restart of ban duration when evasion is attempted

It is customary for the "ban timer" to be reset when a banned user attempts to edit in spite of the ban. No formal consideration is typically necessary. For example, if someone is banned for ten days, but on the sixth day attempts to evade the ban, then the ban timer will be reset from four more days remaining to ten days remaining. If the user doesn't subsequently evade his ban, it will last a total of sixteen days.

• Reverting edits by banned users

Any edits made by a banned user may be reverted to enforce the ban, regardless of the merits of the edits themselves. As the banned user is not authorised to make those edits, there is no need to discuss them prior to reversion. Users are generally expected to refrain from reinstating any edits made by banned users. Users that nonetheless reinstate such edits take responsibility for their content by so doing.

It is not possible to revert newly created pages, as there is nothing to revert to. Such pages may be deleted.

• User pages

Banned users' user pages may be replaced by a notice of the ban and links to any applicable discussion or decision-making pages. The purpose of this notice is to announce the ban to editors encountering the banned user's edits.

• Other means

Serious, ongoing ban evasion is sometimes dealt with by technical means or by making an abuse complaint with the operator of the network from which the edits originate.

A reincarnation is a banned user who has returned to Wikipedia using another user name. Obvious reincarnations are easily dealt with—the account is blocked and contributions are reverted or deleted, as discussed above. See sock puppet for policy on dealing with unclear cases.

• Wikipedia:Arbitration policy/Precedents
• Wikipedia:List of banned users
• CommunityExile and RightToLeave, from MeatballWiki
• Blacklist