Earlier: "...Is there a particular
reason why user and user_talk
need to be searchable?..."
Response: I like to search user_talk pages at least because it a last
bastion where over-zealous admins may not delete the content I seek. It
is generally considered non-competitive, and therefore non-combative. I
find it to contains a wealth of valuable, conceptualizing information.
Sometimes I skip the [Go] button altogether, and I [Search] all
namespaces, and I seek out the user_talk responses to my inquiry so I
can gather background "noise" before reading the main page that responds
to [Go]. For me, too much information is never enough! I can go to
http://www.bartlby.com/ or
http://www.dictionary.com/ if I want a brief
synoptic overview, and I have
http://www.
credoreference.com/
subscription at work for pan-research. I come to Wikipedia to get what
only Wikipedia offers - a community of people passionately interested in
the same subject I am, and I want all the attendant "noise" that comes
with it. I'm savvy enough to tune my own signal-to-noise-ratio filter,
and I do not want someone else deleting whatever they think is
irrelevant information because *they* think I do not want to know all
that. I come to Wikipedia precisely because I DO want to know all that!