On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 10:15:20PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
This is the case I hear most of. When someone insists loudly on deleting all trace of them here and they've had a controversial editing history, the usual reason is to come back and do the same thing again under a new account name.
At the same time, we need to be gracious to people who wish to return under a new name because of privacy concerns (or worse, actual harassment) with the previous name.
In general, I don't see the need to save user talk pages for users who are no longer editing. We are in the business of producing an encyclopedia, not necessarily a record of all discussion that went into the production of that encyclopdia.
I would support deleting the entire userspace of editors after they don't edit for several months, after an announcement and brief grace period for other people to copy out stuff (such as essays) that they wish to preserve. The history would be permanently preserved in database dumps by that time. This might have a side effect of underscoring the social convention that user pages and user talk pages exist only to facilitate writing articles.
Carl