On 13/09/2007, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Don't do it if you vandal-fight to any serious degree. I've got one up and had to semi-protect my talk page, though that may be the particular set of fake-rap-artist-4chan-prank nuts I've managed to provoke over the last couple of weeks. Otherwise, I encourage it, personally.
A user page is your personal page for *project* purposes - the volunteer equivalent of a work intraweb page. (Except the world can see it, but anyway.)
I think the best thing to do with it is to use it as a way of introducing yourself to fellow project workers who may not know you yet - they see you editing, they look at your user page to get an idea about you. (This is what I look at others' user pages for and why I think they're a good thing.)
Others combine this with handy links they use a lot, i.e. they use their user page as a personal working portal page.
So there's no obligation to have any sort of user page, or to write anything on it at all - a lot of people (including admins) redirect their user page to their talk page. But I think it's worth keeping in mind that everything you say or do - or don't say or do - on your user page is part of how you present yourself to others on the project. Like real life, really.
- d.