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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

I do recall getting shadowbanned from Wikipedia in middle school because I kept repeatedly creating an article about my friend, pretending he was a famous person. Indeed they made my edits only visible to me. But of course it was easy to notice that going on another IP address.

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I've read a bit about Wikipedia's ban policies and never saw anything about shadowbanning. You're sure the article wasn't just blocked from creation?

The closest thing I can think of would be pending changes protection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#Pe...) which is not very frequently applied, but plausible for lightly edited articles. Creation of new articles has been restricted to accounts that have made a small number of edits since about 2011.

After they deleted the article several times (it was blocked from creation, but I used different spellings), I started adding mentions of him in random other ones, which iirc were the edits they started making visible only to me. My "sources" were his personal website hosted on my PC. Yes I was a twerp.

It's also possible I misunderstood and was only seeing the removed edits because of HTTP caching, but I did know about that at the time...

As the other poster said, you may have been hit by pending changes protection on the pages you were hitting, which is applied to the page and not to your account.

Or maybe you were so annoying you'd got yourself added to the automated filter list? I guess that's unlikely for a random twerp but who knows.

Didn’t we all do that :-)

Getting the school IP temp banned from Wikipedia was a rite of passage in computer class. Tell a bunch of 13yos that there's a site anyone can edit, you know what'll happen.

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