[WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal: make user pages uneditable

[Tim Starling]

Rick wrote:
 > Do you people not understand how much disgusting (pornographic,
 > name-calling) vandalism goes on on User pages?  It's one of the main
 > reasons for blocking anons.  The Talk page is for editing.  The User
 > page is for a person's philosophy, who they are, what they are.  Why
 > do you feel the need to do that?  What's wrong with just editing the
 > Talk page and leaving the User page alone?

I admit I was being flippant, there's certainly a good argument in 
favour of protecting user pages. There's certain cases where editing 
someone else's user page would be desirable, but it's rarely done anyway 
for philosophical reasons. Two French users, Anthere and Hashar, were 
kind enough to respond to my post by editing my user page, and I 
responded in kind by correcting mistakes in their English on their en 
user pages. Head did the same for me once, correcting my 
machine-translated German at 
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Tim_Starling . These actions could 
only be considered to be a good thing.

However, it's perfectly clear that the vast bulk of user page edits, say 
99%, are malicious. That's partly because good users don't fix mistakes 
on other peoples' user pages out of courtesy, but vandals wishing to 
make a personal attack are not so inhibited.

So maybe 90% of edits to articles are made in good faith, but only 1% of 
edits of other peoples' user pages. There's an argument to be had for 
reducing that 1% of good edits by putting up barriers, in exchange for 
removing the need to revert the other 99%.

Despite what I said in my hasty first post, I'm actually undecided.

-- Tim Starling