On 5/19/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)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.
--
Kirill Lokshin