Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31924693-20140509094043/@comment-452-20140509121510

I agree! (I've been saying this on and off for years)

In fact, the Message_Wall_Greeting namespace already appears to be set up similar to this.

If you click Message_Wall_Greeting:452 you'll get a "You do not have permission to read this page" error. But admins can view and edit it, along with myself.

I'm not sure why public read rights are restricted, but this shows that there is no technological problem with what you suggested. I'm not sure of the specifics of how the Message_Wall_Greeting restriction is set up, but Special:ListGroupRights list the rights which each group has, and shows that "read" and "edit" are separate.

On the other hand, Special:MyTalk/User_talk_archive should really be editable by each user when Message Wall is enabled, but it isn't. I'm not sure whether that's due to them being unable or unwilling to allow it.

The standard response to this suggestion is: "Wikis should be open to everyone to edit, if someone puts a bad link on their user page, anyone can fix it and locking it creates extra work for admins"

But that excuse matters less these days, because I can't edit your Thread post here, or the Message Wall posts of other people - so why should other people be able to edit my userpage?

Every argument against locking User pages is also an argument that Threads should be open to anyone to edit. Every reason that Threads are locked only to the owner and admins is an argument that User pages should be treated the same.

I've haven't looked into the actual figure, but it seems like I've cleaned up more userpage vandalism than other userpage maintenance, so allowing open-editing of userpages may create extra load for admins than locking them.

I'm all for doing this for all pages in the User namespace, but assuming that all User_talk subpages are archives is a bad idea.

If I have a User:452/Draft, then I use User_talk:452/Draft to discuss it.