Editing Template talk:User Data

The e-mail address and birth date categories should be removed (e-mail, gmail, and any of the IM options that also equate to e-mail addresses at those service providers), as the addresses can be harvested by spammers (and the system already has a built-in safe e-mailing feature to begin with), and the full birth date information is simply too revealing and could become an identity theft vector, especially since real names are also made available by many users, too many of whom (especially kids) are not aware of the privacy consequences of being so revealing on wide open public forums.  Also, the COPPA law (US) probably legslly restricts this site from revealing any such information about minors under 13 to begin with, which could be a liability issue (not to mention it encourages "cruising" by only pedophiles). [[User:SMcCandlish|SMcCandlish]] 16:37, 26 September 2007 (CDT)

::That the fields are voluntary wasn't the point, which rather was that the over-disclosing nature of some of the fields will be lost on naive users, who may suffer ill effects as a result.  That [[Special:Emailuser]] can be used in the e-mail field isn't documented, so many users won't do it, and it still renders the field redundant, with the e-mail feature itself which appears in the left menus on the user pages of those who have turned the feature or; at very least the template field's documentation should ''advise'' using [[Special:Emailuser]] there, and should ''warn against'' putting bare e-mail addresses in such fields.  As for COPPA, I wasn't meaning to be alarmist; just saying that the potential headache of such fields probably outweighs the benefits.  Many people, including kids, will just fill them in because they are asked for, instead of thinking about it very deeply.  Most wikis do not ask for such information in basic user templates, so it just kind of seems out-of-place here.  While there's nothing stopping someone from just manually adding such info to their user page, or using little userboxes to do so, it seems likely that the extra work required to do this would cause more reflection. PS: Other fields seem not disconcerting but simply pointless, like how many siblings one has or (?!?) how many parents (I can't think of anyone I've ever heard of with less, or more, than two sets of chromosomes from two parental sources.) I.e., there's some really silly cruft in this thing.  :-)  Maybe my perspective is "too" Wikipedian, but if it doesn't help editing collaboration, it doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose.  PPS: The fact that the template asks about parents and siblings suggests strongly to me (re: COPPA, above) that there are in fact kids involved in this project (who else would think such questions were relevant on a wiki of this nature?), despite the somewhat mature nature of the show. [[User:SMcCandlish|SMcCandlish]] 22:53, 26 September 2007 (CDT)