You know that handy little asterisk that notifies you when there's something new on your user talk page since you last viewed it?

Well, on the English wiki the default value of the user_newtalk field which controls said notifier is 0. On the other wikis, it's 1 as defined in buildTables.inc.

A newly created user account has the field set to 0 anyway by User::addToDatabase(), but in a wiki that's converted up from phase II (ie, meta-wikipedia and potentially Enciclopedia Libre) a migrated user account without an existing user talk page sees the asterisk continuously until a user talk page is created and viewed, since the field doesn't get cleared if the talk page doesn't exist...

My question is, is there a good reason that the database-creation scripts are defining the default as 1, or should it just be set to 0?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)