Joshua Yeidel wrote:
My understanding of the proposal is that sysops would still be able to edit user pages. No "safe-haven" for google-flooding or other miscreations.
Allow me to repeat what I said earlier:
This would create a channel for link spamming, vandalism, and harrasment which can't be cleaned up (except, presumably, by a privileged sysop account).
Generally I'd say that's unwise. The whole point of a wiki in contrast to other types of environments is the shared community responsibility of the users, which requires that everybody be _able_ to pitch in.
You could however probably achieve this by hacking up
Title::userCanEdit().
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On any wiki with such an editing-restriction policy, garbage in user pages cannot be cleaned up by regular users. This harms the ability of the wiki to 'self-heal' in response to incursions. Increasing reliance on a small number of privileged accounts decreases the power and community involvement of everybody else.
Sysops are a scarce resource. On many wikis there are very few such accounts, and days or weeks can quite easily pass before one checks the recent changes. On many wikis there are none (whether effectively or completely).
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)