Project talk:Deletion

What is acceptable on user pages

Moved from Project:Current issues.

The Project:About page is pretty clear about what is allowed and what is not allowed on the site, but we need to have a policy about what is allowed on User pages, and how we deal with things that are not 'allowed'. This policy may be a 'hands off, anything goes' approach, or a much tighter 'only stuff relevant to the project', but either way we should have a policy. Should we delete, warn about or ignore bad user pages? --HappyDog 13:59, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Define "bad user page" for this purpose. Offensive, advertising or downright unrelated to MediaWiki? Just delete them. 86.134.116.228 14:39, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Obvious junk (spam, vandalism, offensive material) is easy to spot and to delete. But there are many user pages created by users whose sole contribution is to create a user page, which points to their Wikipedia user page. Is this acceptable? What about users who give a bit of biography that does not seem relevant to MW, but is otherwise inoffensive? What about anon user pages, or users who create a page and then blank it?

I don't necessarily have strong opinions about these, but I think a set of guidelines is useful. I have given up checking new user pages as I was too often faced with the dillema of not knowing whether a page should be deleted, the user should be advised that the content needs fixing, or the page is acceptable on the site. --HappyDog 23:49, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

"Pages that just link to their equivalent user page on another WMF wiki", "Pages that just link to their equivalent user page on another non-WMF wiki" ... I would have thought these were the obvious thing to put on a user page here to show who you are and where you're from ... I suppose the real rule is of course "Don't be a dick", but anyway ... - David Gerard 19:39, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Links to WMF wikis: I guess it depends on whether that person is a contributor to the site. It's not useful to clutter the wiki with a lot of user pages for people who aren't and never will be users of or contributors to MW.org. For contributors to the site (and also people who it would be useful to have a contact for, e.g. sysadmins, developers, etc.) then it's fine. In most cases I leave these links in place as it's too hard to differentiate, but I wouldn't think it unreasonable to make this a deletion candidate if we decided to go down that path - it's not hard to write a brief sentence about yourself and to embed the link. Here is a perfect example.

Links to non-WMF wikis or external sites: In general these are hard to differentiate from spam. If someone posts a bit about themselves as well then it is different, but I don't have time to check the details of links on user pages, and if all that's there is a link to a non-WMF site I tend to delete it.

That's my current opinion, anyway. --HappyDog 13:20, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

I think personal biographies unrelated to MW on User Pages is perfectly ok. Why not let members talk about themselves?

And pages that link to their user page on WP might just save them the trouble of copying and pasting their biography from there here. Smaug 01:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Smaug; it's useful to be able to see what other interests (especially technical interests) users have. Leucosticte (talk) 22:27, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Use of this policy in practice

Do we actually debate some deletions, or are all almost all the deletions speedy deletions, even when the page in question doesn't meet the speedy deletion criteria set out here? Tisane 08:28, 11 March 2010 (UTC)