[WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages (was: Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project boring to death)

[Anthony]

On 7/29/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> >
> > Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're
> > saying.  And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen
> > this type of thing.  Actually my response would probably be a minority
> > one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian
> > with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the
> > community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.
>
> In my opinion, the only significant problem with your suggestion is that
> we currently have no formal way to distinguish a "Wikipedian" from
> "anyone who just registered an account".  We may know one when we see
> one, but there's a broad grey area and no agreed-upon threshold for
> considering someone a genuine contributor to the encyclopedia.
>
Well, I wasn't really making a suggestion so much as trying to explain
how I feel about things.

But if it were a suggestion, one solution would be to provide everyone
who contributes with some percentage of unregulated webspace equal to
a percentage of their contributions.  Contribute 100K of text and 10
megs of images?  You get 10K of text and 1 meg of images in free
webhosting.

Is this reasonable?  I dunno.  At the point where you're doing that
you might as well just contract it out and let some third party run
the webhosting site.  But still keep things integrated.  What I liked
about my User page that I can't get at other hosting sites is the
ability to easily create links to Wikipedia.  And while you're at it
you could integrate it into other sites too.

I'm going to repeat this so people don't confuse me.  This isn't a
proposal.  It isn't a suggestion.  It's just half-baked
stream-of-consciousness musing on how I feel about things.

> At the time I considered proposing that we do away with user pages
> entirely, but this turns out to be infeasible since we do want to allow
> user subpages, for article drafts and whatnot, and we are just as
> lacking in a formal way to tell a useful user subpage from a vanity one.
>
Article drafts, lists of links, to-do notes, public watchlists, etc.
User subpages can be very useful because they are integrated into the
rest of the site (red and blue links, related changes, what links
here).  They'd be more useful if you didn't have to worry about people
coming along and changing them or deleting them out from under you,
though.

Anthony