message to community about community decline

While I agree, that the term "user" is completely normal, non-offensive, and standard practice when discussing software, I'm not convinced that using that terminology in the UI is non-negotiable. Your suggestions however seem to move towards more specific terms, which imply contribution. While indeed to have a user page you must make at least one edit, it's probably not a very genuine term until they contribute productively to the project elsewhere. If there exists a more appropriate term than user, we should consider it seriously, no matter what language was used in a movie made nearly 30 years ago - I just don't know what that term is at this point, so it seems that user remains the most sensible option.

Another thing to consider is that moving a namespace involves keeping the old one around as an alias, and then you have most content linking to the User:* namespace, and the rest linking to the <alternative term>:* namespace. This is unlikely to improve the user experience more than it degrades it.

Finally, what do other sites most commonly refer to their users as? A very important usability guideline that might be relevant here goes something like, "meeting the users expectation is always better than not."

Finally, can someone weigh in on how this gets translated? Is this issue relevant to English only?

I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that "User Name" is a pretty common interface term that users expect.

I agree with you that 'user' is sensible nomenclature for people. But if you're referring to their home pages, I think we could start saying "Profile" or similar instead.

The American Psychological Association no longer recommends calling people "subjects" in experiments.

At the MIT Media Lab, in our academic papers, the emerging practice is to call them "people" or "participants."

The only two communities that routinely call people "users" are drug addiction and online communities like Wikipedia, so that antiquated terminology is now being deprecated at MIT as well.

On Wikipedia, we find "Users" who are treated as "lusers" to be mindlessly clobbered by a misguided cadre of adolescent Keystone Kops with their toy banhammers, as if Wikipedia were a lame clone of Zynga's Mafia Wars.