Ryan Delaney wrote:
Uh, you're being a bit of a hardliner here. We all accept the risk that someone will commit fraud and identity theft. What we're suggesting here is a simple solution- remove user/talk pages from database dumps. "Don't like it? Too bad!" isn't a very constructive attitude.
But then there'd have to be a new separate database dump that _did_ include the user/talk pages. The purpose of the database dumps is not just to allow someone to toss up a mirror of the current article versions and make a few bucks from banner ads, it's to allow Wikipedia as a whole to be researched or recreated or otherwise manipulated in ways that can't be done just from the existing website. The user and talk pages are important parts of how Wikipedia functions, they should be available for historical reasons if nothing else.