Wouldn't
they purge the entire User: namespace anyway? We're not
so interesting as for our user pages be republished in an actual
encyclopedia.
Yeah, but the images are not stored in the User: namespace.
Currently there is no way to selectively download images that are
just used in articles (unless you use a spider to grab content
instead of the database dumps, wich realy is not a good idea as it
kills our servers).
Now granted our image dump already contains a *lot* of copyright
problems (like our 30.000+ untagged images), so orphanded fair use
parody images from userpages might not be the biggest problem for
re-users at the moment, but at least we are working toward the goal
of cleaning up that mess. However if we allowed fair use on user
pages those would never be cleaned up on our end (unless a better
image dump system gets developed), meaning we would basicaly force
reusers to download a bunch of files they can't use and have to
delete just because some Wikipedia users wanted to have something
funny on theyr userpage. Personaly I don't think can rely be
justified.
Perhaps in addition to the Image: namespace, each page could have an
additional image page much like the talk page, where images intended
for use only on that page (i.e. fair use in articles, but also
userpage images) could be uploaded. I have no idea how this would
work with respect to our db and image dumps but it might be a partial
solution.
--
Philip L. Welch