[WikiEN-l] vanishing talk pages

[AGK]

My inclination is to respect a user's right to privacy as they request it.
The only logistical problem we could encounter with the deletion of a
vanished user's talk pages is that diffs left around in old archives, et
cetera, would be rendered inaccessible to non-administrators and very
annoying to bring up for administrators. Perhaps we could work around this
by restoring the said revisions? This would allow us to respect the user's
rights to privacy, and simultaneously working around all the annoyances
associated with the RTV process.

AGK

On 21/12/2007, Carl Beckhorn <cbeckhorn at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 10:15:20PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> > This is the case I hear most of. When someone insists loudly on
> > deleting all trace of them here and they've had a controversial
> > editing history, the usual reason is to come back and do the same
> > thing again under a new account name.
>
> At the same time, we need to be gracious to people who wish to return
> under a new name because of privacy concerns (or worse, actual harassment)
> with the previous name.
>
> In general, I don't see the need to save user talk pages for users who
> are no longer editing.  We are in the business of producing an
> encyclopedia, not necessarily a record of all discussion that went into
> the production of that encyclopdia.
>
> I would support deleting the entire userspace of editors after they
> don't edit for several months, after an announcement and brief grace
> period for other people to copy out stuff (such as essays) that they
> wish to preserve.  The history would be permanently preserved in
> database dumps by that time. This might have a side effect of
> underscoring the social convention that user pages and user talk pages
> exist only to facilitate writing articles.
>
> Carl
>
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