Wikipedia:Userspace abuse

Superseded by the fact that WP:PROD can now be used in userspace. See the PROD page for details.

As Wikipedia becomes larger it also becomes a bigger target for people who want to abuse it. Despite the fact we have clear rules posted all over the place (most importantly near edit screens where editors cannot miss them) there are still people who ignore these rules and post material that is meant to advertise a certain product or business or promote the user's own name, website or band, etc.

With the recent additional of speedy deletion criterial G11 (against blatant advertising), advertising of commercial material is relatively easily dealt with, but there is a large number of people whose material gets moved to the userspace with the template {{userfied}} where it sits indefinitely because the user who originally posted it has no intention of contributing to the project.

By userfying self-promotional material, we allow people to abuse Wikipedia's resources and use the site as a free webhost which violates WP:NOT.

To get an idea of the size of the problem, Calton is keeping a list of such material here.

This proposal aims to make self-promotion and advertising in the userspace deletable in a clear process. The key to each of the proposals is that the user in question has no relevant contributions outside their userspace.