On 5/19/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
From my reading of [[WP:USER]], it seems to me that a subpage in the
user namespace which expresses opinions about Wikipedia or admin behavior, or one which is the beginning of an attempt to organize users towards one goal or another (a pre-born Wikiproject), should be totally legal, irregardless of whether other users think the idea is a good one or whether or not it "takes up resources".
Conversely, if the nascent WikiProject would be quickly deleted once moved into Wikipedia: -- in other words, if its goals are not among those for which WikiProjects are intended -- then there's no reason to prolong its existence. This is particularly true for projects that are nothing more than anti-Wikipedia rants with a signup sheet.
Personally, I don't care if people want to write little half-baked essays relating to Wikipedia policies on the subpages. If someone wanted to write a little essay about why free content is dumb, let them do it. Who cares? It's not going to change the world, it's not going to sink the project (and if it did sink the project, then that indicates far bigger problems than one little essay). We don't have any "right to free speech" on Wikipedia, but I don't think people are out of line to expect that they have the ability to criticize things they don't like, as long as they don't cross over that fuzzy line to being "attack" (I think accusations of "attacks" should be reserved only for those things which are *clearly* personal attacks, and not just personal criticisms).
I recall a (fairly recent?) ArbCom decision mentioning something about userpages that "bring the project into disrepute"; is there any reason not to extend this criterion to user subpages? The denizens of WikiTruth and Wikipedia Review and their ilk already have the entire rest of the Internet to spout their garbage; there's utterly no reason to legitimize it and help spread it by hosting it (however inconspicuously) on a top-20 site.