User talk:WereSpielChequers/Private Space RFC

Discussion
Dennis Brown &#124; 2¢ &#124; WER  10:20, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Way too early for me to have a firm opinion, but a couple of concerns come up. How would WP:POLEMIC apply in Private: space?  Could this be used for illegal activity by shared accounts that we don't know are shared? Doesn't this reduce the number of people patrolling for MFD material and other abuse by 99%?  What would be the standard for MFD for Private: versus User: pages?
 * I'm assuming that Polemic would only apply to things that others could see! But "Users should generally not maintain in public view negative information related to others without very good reason. Negative evidence, laundry lists of wrongs, collations of diffs and criticisms related to problems, etc., should be removed, blanked, or kept privately (i.e., not on the wiki) if they will not be imminently used, and the same once no longer needed." would no longer need the phrase "(i.e., not on the wiki)".
 * I don't know how this could be used for unidentified shared accounts, unless they were admin accounts then they wouldn't be able to share private pages, they could of course continue to share pages off wiki such as in google docs. I did consider and rejected the idea of having an intermediate level where you could share with designated others "friends" but not more widely, however I see that approach as antithetical to the idea of a wiki.
 * I doubt it would reduce MFD patrollers by as much as 99%, it would reduce the amount they have to patrol, but probably not by anywhere near 90%. From my experience of occasionally patrolling userspace the amount of really nasty stuff that persists for a long time means that we could reduce our need for patrollers by far more than this will without having redundant MFD patrollers to find work for.
 * MFD would not apply for private pages, though some of the speedy deletion criteria would such as U1, G10 and G3  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 10:34, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * The first two points of POLEMIC don't really differentiate. In some ways, it would be an advantage as it would be out of sight, but not sure where the line would be drawn.  The shared issue means 12 people could share a new login and use it as a private place for everything from planning vandalism to terrorism (I know this sounds extreme, but policing it for non-wikipedia material would be very tough).   I mean that those pages would reduce the number of people available to patrol by 99%, as only admin could patrol them, so problem content would stick around longer (although being private makes it generally less troublesome).  That would reduce oversight by the community.  Also, would edits to Private: show up in contribs at all?  Would "fair use" images be ok since they aren't in plain view? You would have to have some form of XfD, I assume it would be MFD, but only admin can see the page. Don't take this as me being down on the issue because I'm not pro or con yet, these are just questions that someone is going to ask, and to get a bead on the ramifications of the private: space, they have to be asked.  It is a very interesting idea, I just don't have a full image of the big picture yet but want to understand.  Dennis Brown &#124; 2¢ &#124;  WER  10:51, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Dennis, this is why I dropped a note there as I wanted to chew the idea over with a few people before starting a full blown RFC. The idea of multiple people sharing an account to communicate privately is interesting, but already possible in many other places. For example Wikia allows closed wikis, and any place that allows you to create a throw away email account can be misused that way by just continually amending an email draft without sending it, though as with our accounts it would be a breach of the ts&cs. So I don't see that we need to do anything about that here, unless it somehow becomes a problem.
 * I don't see the problem of only admins being able to patrol these pages, since only admins and the author can see them. Graffiti on the outside of a house is a public problem, graffiti in someone's bedroom is not a public problem. Yes there may be occasions where admins look at a problematic account and delete its private pages but would they ever need to look at the private pages of an account that had not yet been blocked or at least warned?
 * Good point re where the edits show up. I would say that they are a third group and only need show up when a page is moved out of private space or deleted.
 * Re Fair use and indeed copyvio, in some cases it won't be copyvio if someone is making personal use of something, the point where you are publishing somthing under an open license is when you make the page public. Now some copyrights would be breached merely by copying into your personal space, but others won't be, and the point where most people get upset about copyrights is when you republish by sharing with others. So my hope is that we could largely ignore what people are doing in their private space and most of our attention should rightly be focussed on what they are publishing for everyone to see.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 11:23, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It is interesting, and smart to start here in your own corner, to hammer out some of the tough questions. The idea is new enough that answers are not always obvious, and for that matter, not even all the questions are.  I still think there may need to be some kind of xfd besides speedy, just for procedures sake, although I admit I dont have a specific example of why right now.  Hope you don't mind my good faith hammering with questions,  if it moves forward, the next step won't be so kind.


 * Other questions: Would it show up in "what links here" and other types of listings? ie: is the title of the page read protected, or is only the content? Do contributions still fall under CC/GNU or can they be "all rights reserved"? ie: can the foundation "take it" and use it how they want without your permission? (current policy and TOS would say "yes")  How does WP:OUT apply here?  It isn't public of course, but do we allow editors to create a list of real identities of editors who have not revealed this onwiki?  I assume personal attackes, etc. are ignored just as libelous claims would be since it isn't public, but WP:OUT is in a class by itself.  What about potentially illegal material?  Like Wikileaks stuff about a govt. that is classified. What if we stumble across a suicide note? Or a threat to kill, or a Unibomber style manifesto?  I know these sound far fetched but these are going to be asked in a larger discussion and it isn't exactly clear where the line falls at this stage.  No rush to answer.  These aren't rhetorical but may require some thought or even debate.  Dennis Brown &#124; 2¢ &#124;  WER  14:35, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Dennis, this is exactly the sort of pre RFC discussion that I wanted.
 * As far as what links here and so forth I see no need to treat these pages differently from deleted ones. I.E. they don't show up until you publish them. I don't care whether they get counted in stats such as wp:EDITS and I hope no-one else cares either.
 * Re copyright it would be tempting to make this user owned in the same way that your watchlist is or ought to be, if you change the status to non-private then you are publishing the work under an open license. But that could create practical issues for people who copy in a section from elsewhere as that they would need to license cc-BY-SA. This probably needs a lawyer to decide, but my preference would be to say that while it is private you have not yet published it and the licensing needs to be resolved at the point of publication. That would mean that in the event of an editor dying we wouldn't be able to publish all the draft articles that they were privately working on, but nor would we if they were in word docs on their PC.
 * Suicide notes, threats, lists of suborned admins or instructions as to how one makes class A drugs, Chacha, WMD or malware, I would suggest if G3 or G10 deletion is inadequate then an email to Arbcom is in order. The broader issue is do we have any obligation to rifle through these pages - this is free workspace so I doubt there would be a problem getting the right to look at these pages under certain circumstances. My assumption is that if these are private draft pages on the internet then there is less legal concern at keeping them supervised than if they are public pages. After all what is or should be the legal difference between the contents of these pages than a page on a paper notepad on my desk or in a private gdoc? If someone wants to check the handwritten note in my hand they need a warrant to enter my home. But yes a lawyer would need to look through the proposal before it went live.. We don’t systematically check everything in userspace and there is some nasty stuff to find if one looks. But remember the reason for doing this proposal is to have little or no scrutiny on these pages so that we can concentrate our scrutiny elsewhere and not irritate people with overhasty deletions. I would be happy if they were pages that admins could look at if they had "reasonable grounds for suspicion". Would that work for you?  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 16:55, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Interesting. I'm more of the line that admin can look at them without cause, for the purpose of maintaining the encyclopedia, just as we don't have to ever explain looking at deleted article or RevDel'ed edits.  I think if you start getting into "reasonable grounds", then you open a can of worms and a box of drama at ANI, with people who don't have access to the data anyway.  We need free access or we can't do our jobs and for a variety of reasons I could expand on.  I think it would be a hard sell otherwise.
 * As for "owning" the data in the hidden pages, I never viewed my watchlist as "own", just private, so that will require some thought. That would require the Foundation to make a very fundamental change in the TOS, as currently, even the words in this discussion are CC/GPL.  You are right that it would take a lawyer.  I don't have a problem with that concept in theory.
 * A couple of new things pop in my mind. Not trying to pound you, I'm just anticipating what might be questions by others.  Feel free to interleave the answers or reformat if you choose Dennis Brown &#124; 2¢ &#124;  WER
 * I can see this working in any of several ways.
 * Like my watchlist, even admins can't see private pages, though I'm sure some combination of developer or functionary can
 * Admins can see Private pages, but like a cop pulling over a motorist, or a checkuser checking an editor'd IP address, there would be some rules as to what behaviour would justify such snooping. An admin RFA !vote of "Private pages look OK" would be as out of order as an Oversighter !voting in an RFA with a rational of "IP checks out as unlikely to be a sock of any of the usual suspects"
 * Admins would have a general right to roam in Private space
 * My preference is for option 2. The only option I dont see working would be a fourth option, if we said that Private space had to be more strictly patrolled than userspace is currently.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 11:29, 10 July 2014 (UTC)


 * With regard to the idea above that things are owned in private space, but licensed once they're moved out, I would like to put forward the idea that the history is gutted at this point. In other words, we may hate cut-and-paste moves, but we only do what is in effect a cut-and-paste move from Private to non-Private space. Benefits: Fewer revdels, or missed opportunities for revdels.  Cons:  Admin fixes/improvements to drafts in private space lose attribution. Seems like an excellent tradeoff.  --j⚛e deckertalk 01:43, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Don't think we can do that, for copyright reasons - I think our CC-BY-SA licensing requires attribution — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:12, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
 * In the case where, say, I do 30 drafts of something, and then move it into public space without anyone editing it, I don't expect there's a problem. But otherwise, I'm sure you're right.  --j⚛e deckertalk 06:50, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't see private space as somewhere that admins would be often be looking at let alone fixing stuff. Why would you bother to look at the private space of a goodfaith editor? It would be like snooping through someone's desk or wastepaperbasket. I see the point over revdel, in theory someone could create a page in private space with hundreds of revisions and buried amongst them the particular version of the page that they then email a link to when cyberbullying someone. But is that likely, more likely than in userspace, and couldn't it be dealt with by exception? What is more likely is that someone could copy a paragraph into their private space giving attribution in the edit summary, then copy another paragraph from another article with attribution in the edit summary. In such circumstances - and we are probably dealing with someone who knows what they are doing, attribution would require moving the page from private to public with edit history. But the vast majority of these moves would be pages only edited by the one author, so copyright is moot until they publish by making it public.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 07:48, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Doesn't Draft serve this function?

 * Not entirely, Drafts gets mirrored and then search-engine indexed very quickly. .  The idea that "Draft"'s use of noindex really changed the game for self-promotion (of products or hoaxes), for copyright, for BLP violations, is mistaken, we still do a great job at publishing those sorts of problems to the world quickly, with the help of our friends at the various wikimirrors.
 * I do wonder, though: Drafts need to be reviewed, hand-checks by reviewers are where most copyvios are found. Draft reviewers need only be relatively competent editors, but there are lots more of those than admins. While we can safely let some bad content sit for a bit in Private space, but it's unlikely that most of the serious problems (G3, G10, G11, G12) are going to be discovered in this proposed Private space, it'll only be caught when it's moved to Draft or Article space. So it's possible that my hope - that with WSC's proposal that we'd keep from broadly publishing the seriously problematic content that we do publish - is unrealistic.  --j⚛e deckertalk 01:35, 8 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Drafts are published on the internet, so we need some sort of moderation to deal with attack pages and so forth. Private space is private to the editor who writes it, we only need to worry about what it contains when the editor decides to make it public.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 10:43, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Isn't Draft better because they can be assisted with fixing copyvios?
Private would disallow this except by admin, who are not necessarily our best copyeditors, and who already have enough to do"
 * Leaving aside the question of whether draft and indeed mainspace are places for collaborative editing, private space is for something that you aren't yet ready to go public with. Much like those editors who write stuff in Word before posting it. So Private space is a precursor to draft space or mainspace, not an a replacement, but hopefully many of the things that get deleted within minutes in mainspace could develop further, or even just quietly sit forever, in Private space.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 10:43, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Free Private storage
'''Q Doesn't this just open the door for people to misuse Wikipedia, by letting them write and store private text that may never have any intention of sharing on Wikipedia itself? This is currently disallowed in open space.'''
 * A Yes this would change our WP:Not Webhost rules. But those rules date from a time when diskspace was far more expensive than it is now. We could put a maximum on this by limiting accounts to say 1mb of Private space, and up that for productive editors - say anyone with over 100 edits. But the practical benefits of making the wiki a less bitey place, and reducing the amount of new "articles" that get immediately speedy deleted, outweigh any trivial cost of storing someone's shopping list.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 11:08, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

What about banned users?
Q Do we delete their private stuff after they are banned?
 * A Deleting sounds a bit harsh, and then gives us the hassle of reinstating stuff after people are allowed to return. Though of course there will be instants where people are being banned because of material they have written which has then been oversighted. We would presumably set this up so that blocked users could only edit their talkpage, and that can't be a Private page. I'd be inclined to leave them access to their Private pages, but as long as they were blocked they could neither edit them or change them to Public, however as at present they could always ask an admin to delete them.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 11:08, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Is content Regulated by what is allowed or what is not allowed
QIs content regulated by a white list (only certain uses), or a black list (all uses except those listed)?
 * A As per the Terms of Use there are certain things you would not be allowed to post on WMF servers, even in private space. How strictly we would need to enforce that, or rather how carefully we would need to search for that is one for Legal. But the main reason for doing this is to reduce the need to check the contents of people's workspace.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 11:08, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Abandoned drafts

 * "How can we find abandoned drafts to be deleted if no one can see them? Will there be a admin-only list of all private pages, like the list of unwatched articles?here are many good reasons  ie: how is it maintained? "
 * Why would we worry about abandoned drafts in private space? I'm not convinced that the time spent deleting abandoned drafts in userspace is worthwhile, but what conceivable benefit could there be in deleting them in Private space? Remember disk space is cheap, so cheap that we keep deleted revisions, so you don't even save diskspace by deleting things.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 08:39, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Openness

 * Comment. I've been thinking about this for a couple of days, and it makes me very uncomfortable. Generally, the idea of private space seems out of line with the Wikipedia ideal of openness - in fact, we're always telling newcomers that they don't even own their own user space and that it's not free-format for them to do what they want. But this private space would even go some way towards giving people their own free web space to use as they wish, regardless of any connection to building the encyclopedia - it wouldn't be fully public space, but all you'd have to do is share username and password and as many people as you want would have access. And it would be pretty much impossible to keep an eye on. We're getting short of active admins as it is, and there isn't anything like the spare capacity to deal with private space problems - and it would have to be pro-active patrolling by admins, because nobody else would be able to report problems they can't see. What problems might there be? Copyright problems - even though "private", we could still have them by sharing use of a login. What nasty things might people do with private space? Child grooming ("use this login and we'll talk, my little ones" - we're already appallingly bad at child protection). Share links to favourite porn collections, terrorist training material, favourite copyvio download sites, etc. In general, I think the idea of providing private webspace (which can be shared with whoever you want) is a bad idea for a project that prides openness so much. I do appreciate the problems it is attempting to overcome, but I can just picture the shitstorms we'd get if we implemented anything like this. — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:43, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
 * We are open about somethings and very closed about others. Many of us write under pseudonyms, Wikimedia wins privacy plaudits for not snooping on its readers, your user preferences and watchlist are private so in that sense we allow people to decide when to be open and when not to be. As for the idea that Private space is somehow problematic and would make us a magnet for terrorists and paedophiles, Facebook, dropbox, Gmail, yahoo and many others allow you private space. I have things in the drafts folder of my yahoo account that have sat there for a decade. Private space would only be shareable by breaking the rules and giving someone your password. Why would people do that when they can create a wiki, a yahoo group or a Facebook group and have it "closed" with a restrictive membership? So why would admins need to pro-actively snoop in Private pages?  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers 08:39, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, you may well be right and I might be raising things that aren't really problems - but I thought it better to raise my misgivings (even if badly articulated) at this stage, as I'd expect other people to have similar thoughts. — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:03, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Abuse potential

 * Let me give you what might seem as an extreme example, but it really isn't. If someone has private space, unlimited, but could be password accessed by others, it would be trivial for them to share child porn, copyrighted images or other offensive material using nothing but text, via Base64.  Hundreds of thousands of us used it to share software over USENET back in the 90s and similar binary to text cyphers back in the 80s.  It is still how porn is shared on USENET, so this isn't an obsolete technology and it is trivial to do.  Basically, we are talking about something akin to MIME.  I still have a license for Forté Agent which can do it on the fly, and free and online programs to do this are everywhere.  It is just simple math.  To the eye, it just looks like random letters until it is decoded.  This could open up a HUGE legal problem for the Foundation.


 * The file File:PD-Help icon.png once encoded looks like this:

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and it goes on for a good deal more, truncated for sanity...

Dennis Brown &#124; 2¢ &#124; WER  23:47, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I've been pondering this for a few days and it still seems like a problem, mainly if we let more than one view with a password.  Maybe filters can prevent?  I don't know, but was interested in your input. Dennis Brown &#124; 2¢ &#124;  WER  15:52, 22 July 2014 (UTC)


 * In these days of high bandwidth sharing a password and sharing a file are not much different. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:03, 23 July 2014 (UTC).

No Index instead

 * Comment Another possibility along these lines would be to just exempt all user-space from being indexed for search. CorporateM (Talk) 13:08, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I think no Index is great way to tackle spam as that relies on getting high ranking in google. But attack pages are a different matter, people create them and then the link spreads round the school. There isn't much point doing that if you have to give people the password in order for them to have a chance to see it.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers 08:39, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Excellent idea
Thought I'd say that first, as I will shortly try and find as many things wrong with it as I can! All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:01, 23 July 2014 (UTC).

Some ideas and queries

 * 1) Would have to be exempt from categories.
 * 2) Why would admins need to be able to see it?
 * 3) Might need quotas (can't have people with millions of private pages, well not many of them anyway)
 * 4) Would need special rules for moves
 * 5) Might need rules for "what links here", etc, and other special pages
 * 6) Might encourage cabals - or cabal paranoia
 * 7) Could be tricky to manage passwords - one per page?  one per user per page? maybe a different schema would be better.
 * 8) Could cause bad forking
 * 9) Would the "good blocked" be allowed to work on their private pages?
 * 10) Would collections of copyright source material be legal (under Fair trading they probably would if confined to a very few people, almost certainly if only 1 or 2)

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:34, 23 July 2014 (UTC).