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