User:Tisane/They care because they want to help the project

The essay WP:CARE basically asks why some users care so much about others' MYSPACEy activities on Wikipedia. The answer is obvious: Because they care about the encyclopedia, and see those activities as hurting it. Whether they're right or wrong is a matter of debate; I personally think that we benefit from the lenity we already have in reference to userpage content, and could benefit from more lenity. But we'll never be able to empirically prove that more lenity would be good, because the users will never allow an experiment to test that hypothesis. So, we're pretty much stuck arguing about what would or wouldn't work in theory. It's much like the logjam that has been encountered between advocates and detractors of anarcho-capitalism; we'll never settle that debate either until full-blown anarcho-capitalism is tried in some jurisdiction and thereby tested to see how it works in practice.

Did Esperanza hurt the project? Did all those userpage "shops" hurt the project? Like all history, it's a matter of interpretation. We don't have all the data that would be needed to establish as a certainty what the truth is.

"Live and let live" only makes sense as a social policy when we're dealing with a situation of property that can be easily demarcated, claimed and possessed by one party. That's why we'll never be able to have a policy of live and let live in the mainspace; the whole point of the mainspace is collaboration, which includes correcting others' errors, whether they recognize them as errors or not. But userspace could be readily claimed by users as their de facto property, much as each Google Gmail account is de facto property of the user. Sure, Google reserves the right to erase or cut off access to any account, but there would an uproar if they did it on a widespread basis.

It's too bad that Wikipedia didn't also develop a tradition of userspace ownership early on in the project. It's very hard to reverse such a tradition once it's firmly established. For instance, we would have a heck of a time trying to prohibit userboxes at this juncture.

At deleting users' résumés, I noted that some users start out using their userspace as a more permanent version of the sandbox in order to get used to the wiki markup before venturing out into the mainspace. (Many new users are, justifiably, a bit timid about the mainspace because it's so easy for stuff placed there to get speedied.) We can't necessarily distinguish those who are doing that from those who are never going to contribute to the mainspace. The danger of friendly fire against a potential good contributor is real.