Ryan Delaney wrote:
Uh, you're being a bit of a hardliner here. We all
accept the risk that
someone will commit fraud and identity theft. What we're suggesting here is
a simple solution- remove user/talk pages from database dumps. "Don't like
it? Too bad!" isn't a very constructive attitude.
But then there'd have to be a new separate database dump that _did_
include the user/talk pages. The purpose of the database dumps is not
just to allow someone to toss up a mirror of the current article
versions and make a few bucks from banner ads, it's to allow Wikipedia
as a whole to be researched or recreated or otherwise manipulated in
ways that can't be done just from the existing website. The user and
talk pages are important parts of how Wikipedia functions, they should
be available for historical reasons if nothing else.