User:WereSpielChequers/Private Space RFC

Draft RFC

To avoid any confusion about the name, this is a userspace page for drafting an RFC about a proposal to change mediawiki to allow each account to have "private pages" that only the creator has access to. It is not a Private Space for me and others who are interested are welcome to to help draft the RFC on this page or discuss and even argue against it on the talkpage.

Proposal

Amend MediaWiki to allow logged in users to create "private" pages that only they (or small groups?) can see.

Implementation

To avoid the risk of anyone deleting anything by moving it to their userspace and then marking it private, this would need to be done in one of two ways.

1. Create a new namespace "Private". Anyone could create pages under their ID in that namespace, and only they, the admins, functionaries and developers would have access to those pages. So this page could be created as Private:WereSpielChequers/Private_Space_RFC instead of User:WereSpielChequers/Private_Space_RFC and only I could see it until I moved it to another userspace. Only someone with admin rights would be able to move a page to someone's Private space, as to do so would be akin to deletion. But the user could move their Private page elsewhere, or change its status to shared. If this relies on moving we would need to allow non-autoconfirmed editors to move pages out of their "private" space.
2. Use the existing Userspace, but allow editors to mark pages as "private" when they create them or if only they have edited them and they haven't been moved. Only Admins would still be able to mark pages as Private, as to do so would be akin to deletion. As any editor would be able to change their own private pages to public there would be no need to change the "move" rights.

In either event:

Pages marked Private would function the same way as other pages in Mediawiki, but would only be served to requests from logged in users with that account or the appropriate permissions.

MFD would not apply for private pages as you can't have community discussion on pages that most of the community can't see (and would rarely need to delete such pages), but the following speedy deletion criteria would apply: U1, G3, G7, G10, G11 and G12.

Rationale

Our current arrangements for new page creation fail for deletionists, inclusionists and those with privacy or copyvio concerns. The more Deletionist you are the more you resent the tidal wave of spammy unrescuable articles that pour in via newpages or Articles for creation. Those with Privacy concerns worry about the amount of Privacy breaching stuff festering in userspace and elsewhere, those who worry about copyvio have similar concerns about that. The inclusionists worry that we are way too bitey to goodfaith newbies and that much is deleted that could be rescued or would eventually become meaningful if the author had been given a few minutes to make their second edit. Some of us would agree with more than one of those critiques, some even with all four. But most of all our current arrangements fail for most of the 25% of new editors who start their editing by trying to create a new page. Creating Private pages reduces problems from all those perspectives, it also empowers the newbie by giving them an option to save their first 20 minutes work and come back to it later without actually publishing it for others to see.

Provisos

Space on the Internet used to cost significant amounts of money, but computing costs have transformed that to the point where we don’t need to care if a million user accounts had an average of 100kb of "private" space - it should no more worry us than a traditional bricks and mortar company worrying about the amount of paper used to take notes at meetings, or the amount of space used for "drafts" in people's user accounts. However it probably makes sense to put some arbitrary limit on private page sizes to stop vandals creating accounts and uploading gigabytes into "private" space.