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Wikipedia mobile app giving wrong block message
Open, LowPublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

  • Have a user account
  • Do not have had your useraccount autocreate at the shared repository yet
  • Be on an IP address that is blocked against autocreation on the shared repository
  • Log in to the Wikipedia mobile app
  • Try to edit Wikipedia

What happens?:
The app stops, wrongfully telling the user that:
a) their username is blocked
b) and that it is blocked ON Wikipedia

What should have happened instead?:
Unless they are attempting a write action to the shared repository, nothing should happen. If they do attempt a write to the shared repository they should get an appropriate block message from the remote project

Software version (skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):
Users screenshot:

Screenshot_20230515_153952_Wikipedia (3).jpg (2×1 px, 527 KB)

More breakdown of the production situation can be seen in VRT Ticket 2023051510016001

Event Timeline

Thanks for bringing this to us.
The "Edits" screen in the app is a rather special case: this is where we show the user our list of "suggested edits" tasks, which includes things like adding article descriptions and adding image captions, where the edits are actually made to Wikidata and Commons respectively.

Therefore, when displaying the Edits screen, we preemptively check whether the current user is blocked on Wikipedia (in their language) as well as whether they're blocked on Wikidata or on Commons. If we receive a "blocked" response from any of those sites, we disable that whole screen and show the block message that was received. (It doesn't mean that the user isn't able to edit actual articles on their wiki.)

That's kind of a blunt instrument, and I do agree that this block message is quite confusing, although it is indeed coming from the server side; we're simply displaying the message that we receive.
I can see some ways for us to improve the clarity of the logic in the Edits screen:

  • We could simply not perform a preemptive block check, and allow the user to enter the Suggested Edits workflows, and show a block message only when the user attempts to submit an edit.
  • We could disable only the types of suggested edits that correspond to the sites on which the user is blocked, i.e. disable suggested image captions if they're blocked on Commons, etc.

I'll reiterate that if this user is not blocked on their language Wiki, then they should be able to edit articles in the usual way while browsing them in the app. It's only on the Edits tab where we perform this extensive block check across multiple wikis, for the purpose of gating off access to the Suggested Edits feature. We'll discuss with the team soon about making this more clear.

At the very least, the user needs to know where to get help - our lost user was asking at the English Wikipedia about why they were blocked, the source of the error did not lead them to seeking assistance at commonswiki, confusing both them and our volunteers on enwik. The message says "blocked from editing Wikipedia" - which is patently false; and the message suggests that someone at Wikipedia did the blocking as the only mention of a project on that message is Wikipedia.

I've created a separate task (T336789) with a short-term solution, just so that the immediate problem of showing unnecessary or incorrect block messages can be resolved.
We'll keep this parent task open, to be revisited with longer-term design improvements in the Edits screen, especially in cases of mixed access across different projects.