Rob Church wrote:
On 17/05/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
"Personal statements that could be considered polemical, such as opinions on matters unrelated to Wikipedia" are specifically disallowed in the guideline "Wikipedia:User page". While this is a guideline, and not policy, it does create a presumption that, if someone objected to an apparently polemical statement on your userpage, you'd at least undertake a good faith effort to demonstrate how this benefits the project. You really don't get to tell the fellow "stay off my userpage."
That ought to become one of our de facto policies; it would lash back at most of the MySpace and LiveJournal wannabes, who could then go all emo, get such a blog and start writing about how mean Wikipedia is for wanting to emphasise improving content, not hosting all sorts of crap
What's "emo"?
I can see a lot of administrators getting pretty worried if you persistently retained a statement of personal opinion similar to the one you gave above on a page anywhere in Wikipedia.
Worried? I can see a lot of them jumping to block.
I'm not particularly concerned about such comments about a political figure on a user page; it says a lot about that user in very concise terms.
Nevertheless, I would be more concerned about the uneven application of such a policy to one end of the political spectrum only.
Ec