User:Tisane/Relax the user page guideline
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In my opinion, we should let users put whatever they want in their userspace, with the exception of threats, child porn, copyvios, and other stuff that could cause legal trouble for the project.
Some new users are timid about editing the mainspace until they've gained some proficiency with wiki markup. True, they could use the sandbox to practice, but anyone can wipe it clean while the new user is in the middle of something. So it is logical for the new user to experiment in userspace and put content there that might not pass muster in the mainspace, for notability reasons or otherwise. When we swoop in and nominate their userpages for deletion, it can be somewhat bitey.
But what about established users who want to use their userspace as a personal blog or for social networking? True, this does consume some hosting resources, and there will be a small number of users who are here primarily just for blogging or social networking purposes. But I think that in most cases they will also be here to edit the mainspace. If people are allowed to do their blogging/social networking/etc. on Wikipedia, they will spend more time on Wikipedia rather than, e.g. Blogspot or Myspace. When they hit the watchlist to check for changes to their userspace, they'll also see changes to the mainspace that they might want to address. I think that in the end, the pros will outweigh the cons. Hosting resources are plentiful; good editors willing to put a lot of time into the project for free are relatively scarce. If we have to trade off some of the former to get more of the latter, it is not such a bad deal.
Savvy donors should understand that tradeoff and not be overly concerned that a small portion of their donations goes toward hosting community-building content. Actually, this would not even be an issue if we would raise our revenue through a few unobtrusive, content-related, text-based advertisements, perhaps using Google adwords. Why let the sentiments of donors hold the good of the project hostage? The donors of the past knew when they donated that their funds would be spent as the organization saw fit, and that the organization never made any commitment against advertisements or against allowing certain userpage content, so I don't think we would be defrauding them.
As we get more users, more mainspace content will be created, which will attract donors and still more users. It will lead to an upward spiral. Or, I should say, it could lead to an upward spiral if this proposal had any chance of being implemented by the community, which it doesn't.