Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4839035-20130120135350/@comment-188432-20130124002912

Well I suppose you have to weigh the benefits of having meaningful user pages against the drawbacks of a lot of redlinks that will never turn to blue.

Clutter in the user namespace only matters, I suppose, if you have a bot that's continually patrolling that namespace. Obviously, the more pages you have, the longer it'll take a bot to patrol them.

But the way I look at it, number of pages in the user namespace is a badge of honour, because it's an easy metric by which you can judge how many people have actually edited at least once on your wiki. Just get DPL or a bot to give you a quick count of the number of pages in the user namespace, and there ya go. :)