Proposal:Universal User Page

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A feature request or bug related to this proposal has been submitted to Bugzilla under ID 14759. See Category:Proposals with Bugzilla submissions for all submitted bugs.

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

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1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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See also: Proposal:Universal login eligibility by default

Summary

The User: namespace is used for the User/Contributor pages. This is often an area where users add information about themselves but also their ongoing activities, contributions or acting as an interaction space with other Wikipedia contributors. Currently, if you are contributing in multiple wikipedia projects, you have a different User: space per wikipedia project. This is difficult for User/Contributor to maintain all the different pages and the redirect is breaking the flow of Users when browsing on a specific Wikipedia project.

Proposal

A specific namespace could be created to have a global user page. This could be activated on unified accounts with a specific parameter for universal user page.

Motivation

That would ease the user/contributor to have a single page to make notes, discuss with others or inform about their competencies.

Key Questions

• Does the universal user page should be enable by default? or per user request/config?
  • I would suggest no as some contributors have really a different pages per project. TBD
• Should the Universal User Page include a functionality to merge existing User: page into the universal one. (just like the unified login)
• Does this proposal apply to user talk pages, too?
  • I would say "yes". What's the impact on talk: namespace?
• What about across languages? Should we put these pages at, say, user.wikimedia.org ?
  • an idea : http://user.wikipedia.org/YourUsername/ for the global page with subpage if required http://user.wikipedia.org/YourUsername/fr but the initial purpose was somehow to abolish the page per language but the sub page would still make sense?

Potential Costs

• More load on the registration process
• A relatively small amount of developer time

References

• bugzilla:14759
• http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Universal_login_eligibility_by_default - a check of existing User: page with the same page could done just like the proposal for universal login eligibility.
• User:AlexandreDulaunoy - an example why supporting an universal user page can be useful.

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Universal User Page.

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