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I agree with some of that.. :) I certainly agree that this is a sentiment brought up by folks, and something that WMF may want to nudge WM project leaders about - maybe offer more trainings, mandatory trainings for some positions, I think there are a number of solutions that if a WMF leader say "someone should look into this" it would embolden the community to address it. Right now, I think WMF is too anxious about guiding (or..gasp..leading) the WM movement to do something like that. Maybe the SOPA action has made WMF bolder / less anxious?
However, I don't think the solution is putting extremely valuable content on User pages, I'd rather just convince the annoying folks to go away - or just be bold and do it anyway. :) The glorious thing about anything online, you can easily ignore it. I certainly think it's a fair community expectation that we respond to each other's feedback and such - but there are some people who are just so out in crazy town, I don't pay any attention.
That's how I sleep at night..well..that at poking at beehives for kicks and giggles from time to time. ;)
I don't think anyone is suggesting user pages can't house good content, or should be prevented. However, there's more barriers to casual MW.org visitors finding that valuable content, which makes some of us sad. :( Perhaps it could be addressed, in part, by better linking within existing content to those pages? Or is that stating the obvious? :)
I'm not interested in marginalizing the jerks - it's equally bad for us to do it to them as it is for them to do it to us. Part of the reason they're jerks is because they're talented and contribute a lot, which they feel gives them license to walk on people, while others bite their lip. Challenging or confronting them might take away whatever pleasure they get out of their participation here, and if that happens, we lose their valuable contributions.
Instead, I think a better strategy is figuring out what makes them tick, where they derive their power from, and then figuring out how to neutralize them without a confrontation.
One strategy they use is to delete documentation housed at mediawiki.org and insist documentation and other resources be held hostage in their own sadistic little menagerie where they are the sole gatekeepers. That's easy to thwart - just tell them it's fine if they want to keep documentation on their own sites, but deleting other people's documentation here at mediawiki.org for that reason is not permitted.
Once that is the policy, then they'll have to think up new creative ways to satisfy their jerk-urge. Hopefully we can identify those patterns and subtly neutralize them quickly without making more waves than necessary. And, you never know, they might decide it's easier to just resolve their personal issues that makes them jerks, instead of wasting their lives trying to find exploits in the WMF social structure.
