On Mon, 26 May 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 16:44:30 -0700 From: Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Countering the vandals who attack users (not just pages)
Erik Moeller wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
David A. Wheeler wrote:
At the least, why not let the User:NAME pages be ONLY editable by NAME? The "User_talk:" spaces need to be editable in some way, but I don't see a need for others to "fix" the User: space of someone; it's not critical that that content be fixed, and there's advantanges to having some areas that are "precious" to each user.
Your other suggestions were against Wikipedia's openness, and I'm happy to be confident that they will never happen. But I do think that read-only user pages *as*an*option* would be a useful idea. There have been other problems before.
It is an option. Leave a message on a sysop's talk page and ask them to protect your user page.
Then the user himself would be unable to edit it.
You don't say? Well, these are the problems of read-only pages. ;-)
Ah, I see. Making a joke at the expense of my poor phrasing. Very well.
Luckily I included David's original text, so does anybody have a comment on what we were actually talking about?
I'd like to see it as an optional thing, maybe a user viewing something in their own namespace could see a "protect this page" link in the sidebar like sysops do for all pages. I'd also like to see it extended to some kind of subpages, though I'm not sure whether that ought to go for [[User:JohnOwens/Temp]], [[User:JohnOwens:Temp]], [[User:JohnOwens (temp)]] pages, all of the above, or what.