Anthony wrote:
Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're saying. And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen this type of thing. Actually my response would probably be a minority one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.
In my opinion, the only significant problem with your suggestion is that we currently have no formal way to distinguish a "Wikipedian" from "anyone who just registered an account". We may know one when we see one, but there's a broad grey area and no agreed-upon threshold for considering someone a genuine contributor to the encyclopedia.
In other words, we'd be providing a free-as-in-beer, anonymous, mostly unregulated webspace for anyone with an internet connection.
To some extent, of course, we're already doing that, but we've set up all sorts of minor speed bumps to make this feature less attractive to those who want to use it for purposes unrelated to the project. In fact, the whole userbox controversy effectively hinged on this: how easy or hard should we make it to put a 240-by-45-pixel box on one's user page, given that there clearly were and are people who are interested in doing that but not interested in contributing to the project?
At the time I considered proposing that we do away with user pages entirely, but this turns out to be infeasible since we do want to allow user subpages, for article drafts and whatnot, and we are just as lacking in a formal way to tell a useful user subpage from a vanity one.
Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
This doesn't mean you couldn't describe yourself on your user page. But if the page didn't include _any_ information actually relevant to the project, such as your contributions to Wikipedia, areas of interest, useful skills, etc., it would be unsuitable and speediable.