On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Larry Sanger wrote:
This is a User page. We've never come to definitive policies on what
should be "allowed" on User pages, but we've taken a mostly
laissez-faire attitude so far.
Please understand, I'm not saying that that policy should be changed
(while neither do I think that all users have an inalienable right to put
*whatever* they want into their user space--but I don't think anyone is
denying that right now).
The request for refactoring or moving such pages is not an attempt to
infringe anyone's rights (for example, Cunc can continue to ignore the
request without comment if he chooses). It's instead a matter of simple
politeness and civility, of trying to make Wikipedia a place where people
are *more* apt to treat each other respectfully than they are now.
This should probably be moved to meta, right? It's not an
encyclopedia article, per se, so it shouldn't be in the main article
namespace in the first place.
That would be a slight improvement but it wouldn't achieve what tarquin
was trying to achieve, viz., demonstrating to new visitors that constant
verbal warfare and nursing festering resentments isn't what we are about.
(Of course, it's a matter of debate whether we should use this means of
achieving it!)
This is why moving the "anti-American Wikipedians" page to m.w.o (linked
directly from the main Wikipedia user space) misses the point as well.
We shouldn't be trying to balkanize ourselves for the simple reason that
what we're doing requires cooperation, and a lot of it!
If we were
*really* serious about making Wikipedia more civil, we would
demonstrate that we have the maturity and courage to talk about such
problems openly and seriously--and then finally committing ourselves to
burying the hatchet.
I'm all for this. Perhaps Cunc will exercise some of the "ten noble
virtues" from his "WikipediAhimsa" page and remove whatever pages in
his user space are causing anyone discomfort. Such a gesture might be
greatly appreciated and help forge a better path forward.
Yes, I agree totally, while acknowledging that he can continue to
voluntarily host all that stuff in his user space.
Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell