Marc Riddell wrote:
Gurch,
I "can" do that if the person has, in fact, created a User Page. As for the
extent of the information, that should, of course, be left entirely to the
discretion of the User - just something other than (quoting one I came
across) "There, I created one, are you happy!?
Marc
If the extent of the information provided really is "entirely at the
user's discretion", then they should be able to opt to provide no
information at all. This is the current situation.
To require anything else would present a barrier to contribution. This
is a bad thing; Wikipedia has always tried to keep such barriers as
unintrusive as possible. This is the whole reason why we allow anonymous
and pseudonymous edits, and request no personal information from anybody
-- because doing so would vastly reduce the number of contributions made
and so the size and quality of the enyclopedia. I am certain that if
such a barrier had been in place from day one Wikipedia would be nothing
compared to what it is now; it may even have been abandoned altogether.
-Gurch