oh sorry! I said "Thus, the author losts control over his userpage." while I should write "Thus, the author losts control over his/her userpage." :/ Damn, I feel shame. I haven't written in sexist language for a long time, and now I just did that :( I can't believe I forgot one of my most basic rules of writing. Next time better remember to re-read my msg before clicking "Send"! :) Also need to say thank you for replying and agreeing with my proposal. --- Optim <optim81(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools

--- Sascha Noyes <sascha(a)pantropy.net> wrote: You are right and I am thankful for your comments. Just to add that my idea is that it just helps privacy indirectly. Some person may be more than willing to write in public some information about himself/herself if he/she does not expect people to begin redistributing this information all over the Internet, making it more and more public. As an example: I may be happy to announce in Wikipedia that I don't eat meat nor fish (so I am a vegetarian). I may do that because I may want to meet other Wikipedians with the same preferences etc. There may be dome people that I wouldn't like to know what I eat and what I don't eat, for example I would prefer not to let my friends, family etc know this info. I don't expect them to be very interested in Wikipedia or know how to use it. The probability of someone finding this info is low enough that I consider it safe to publish such info because I have some "partial privacy" (the info is public, but I know few people can or are willing to access it, as opposed to "total privacy" where many people can access the info so I prefer not to publish it at all). However, as Wikipedia is becoming more and more common, many sites start mirroring its content, including user pages. In this case, the probability of someone finding info on me that I don't want him/her know is becoming higher. This is just a small simple example about a topic which is not so important. Hope this helps you to understand my definition of "relative privacy". Thus, privacy does not only mean "zero probability of undesirable information disclosure". If that probability is low enough by my standards, I may decide to publish more info on Wikipedia about me and socialise more. However, when this probability becomes higher, I may start feeling uncomfortable and be forced switch to "total privacy". Especially when other people are mirroring userpages (and talkpages!). By having separate downloadable files for articles and userpages/talkpages, we give the ability to downloaders get only the material they are really interested in: The articles. I see no reason why somebody would want to download all userpages and talkpages, except if he/she is interested to research how Wikipedians communicate with each other etc. In reality I don't see any need to have userpages and talkpages downloadable, so such downloadable files could not exist at all. We could just have a downloadable file for Articles and another one for the whole database (Articles+Userpages+Talkpages). Actually I just want to make sure that "accidental" copying/downloading/redistribution of userpages and talkpages will not happen again. --Optim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools