[WikiEN-l] vanishing talk pages

[Carl Beckhorn]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 10:15:20PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> This is the case I hear most of. When someone insists loudly on
> deleting all trace of them here and they've had a controversial
> editing history, the usual reason is to come back and do the same
> thing again under a new account name.

At the same time, we need to be gracious to people who wish to return 
under a new name because of privacy concerns (or worse, actual harassment) 
with the previous name. 

In general, I don't see the need to save user talk pages for users who 
are no longer editing.  We are in the business of producing an 
encyclopedia, not necessarily a record of all discussion that went into 
the production of that encyclopdia.  

I would support deleting the entire userspace of editors after they 
don't edit for several months, after an announcement and brief grace 
period for other people to copy out stuff (such as essays) that they 
wish to preserve.  The history would be permanently preserved in 
database dumps by that time. This might have a side effect of 
underscoring the social convention that user pages and user talk pages 
exist only to facilitate writing articles.

Carl