I would favour giving every user a preferences ''option'' where they can choose whether or not to protect their own user page.
This in part for the reasons Tim gave (below). Also, views about whether or not others should be allowed to edit someone's own user page tend to differ, so introducing such an option respects and reflects such differing views. I don't think non-abusive users who feel that their user page is "for them to control" should be ''forced'' to keep it open for community editing. Finally, as was observed previously, user page vandalism is a bigger problem with some users (and less with others), so leaving that one up to the individual user just makes sense.
However: * Admins should be able to override the protection and "police" cases where users might be abusing their own user page -- eg. using it as a non-Wikipedia related home page, posting slurs or legal threats or other content that would never be tolerated by the community. (That's because Wikipedia is not a home page provider. User pages are pages ''about'' the individual Wikipedian and not for posting absolutely anything which that natural person pleases.) * Users should NEVER be allowed to protect their Talk page.
a still ailing -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
On 5 Nov 2004, at 17:24, Tim Starling wrote:
...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