User:MZMcBride/User pages

Background and purpose

User pages are designed to help facilitate collaboration among editors. They are a way for contributors to the project to express themselves.

Any contributor may have a user page. And if someone contributes substantively to the article namespace, most content is allowed on a user's user page (within reason, obviously).

Specific case

There is a specific subset of user pages that can be problematic, though. These pages belong to users who have only ever edited their user page. There are approximately 90,000 user pages like this on the English Wikipedia. People who have user pages but have not contributed to any pages other than their own user page are affectionately called leechers.

Types of pages

There are several broad categorizations for leechers' user pages.

Test pages. These generally include things like "[[Media:Example.ogg]]" or "heyo" or something similar.
Pages that have been created and then subsequently blanked by the author.
Pages that are pure vanity pages or spam.
Vandalism. (E.g., "Jake Flake is a homo.")
Sockpuppet taggings.

Through consensus at various MfDs, it has been established that the first four types of pages can safely be deleted.

In the case of the second type, the blanking of the page is seen as a request to delete the page (this is especially helpful to remove the pages from Google search results).

Justification

Why delete these pages? What's the harm in keeping them forever?

Well, first we must examine the purpose that these pages serve. For users who have never contribute to the project's goal (building a free online encyclopedia), these users are merely using Wikipedia as a web host or pastebin. This stands in direct contradiction with the purpose of the site, and keeping these pages around indefinitely sets a poor precedent for new users.

We must firmly establish that we are not a test wiki and we are not a social networking site. There are hundreds of other sites where people can test the wiki concept or chat with their friends or create their own personal homepage. Using Wikipedia is not an appropriate venue for such things.

There's also no need to immortalize a user's ability to register an account and create a page with the content "poop."

Deleting the pages reduces the size of the revision table and makes database dumps smaller (although in the grand scheme, this is likely negligible).

These deletions apply only to users who have 0 non-deleted edits in a non-User: namespace.