[WikiEN-l] Re: April Fool's Day Lame-O-Rama

Sat Apr 2 11:30:13 UTC 2005

Richard Holton (richholton at gmail.com) [050402 13:54]:

> This applies to anything posted to Wikipedia. You'll see the same
> notice about the GFDL below the edit box on a User page as anywhere
> else.
> What seems to have at least some degree of consensus is that others
> should grant people a great deal of control over what they have in
> their user space. But this is a matter of courtesy, not a matter of
> copyright or Wikipedia policy (that I am aware of).

There is a general feeling (which the ArbCom tried to put into words) that
your userspace is pretty much yours, as long as it's for project-related
purposes. You can delete anyone else's changes, remove their comments,
revert it as many times a day as you like, etc. Using it as general hosting
space isn't considered acceptable (not project-related) nor is using it as
a launching pad for personal attacks (against the project). I'm sure
there's some elegant and retrospectively obvious wording of it, but I think
the idea is reasonably clear for the non-pathological.

> Many admins seem to treat unwanted changes to another's user pages as
> vandalism...and I do not wholly disagree.  But I don't know that it
> follows the letter of the policy.

Simple vandalism is still simple vandalism if it isn't the user themselves
doing it. Some people get *really* upset about even a spelling or
punctuation correction to their user page, GFDL or not, "edited
mercilessly" warning or not. 

In this particular case, Bishonen's nihilartikel may be GFDL, but she did
ask nicely for it not to be used in certain ways. So it then becomes a
consideration of reasonableness and politeness rather than copyright and
policy.

- d.