Do not edit other people's user pages without their permission

[confocaloid]

LifeWiki:Policies and guidelines said:

Do not edit other people's user pages without their permission. There may be exceptional situations in which this is warranted (e.g., if a user page contains spam or inappropriate content, a moderator may remove it), but in general a user page belongs to that user, so others should not edit it. Talking to someone on their user page's talk page is fine.

On January 1, 2024 dvgrn added the following sentence:

Some user pages may be deliberately designed as collaborative collection points for information to be added by multiple LifeWiki editors, in which case editing permission for those specific pages may be explicitly or implicitly given in advance.

Also on the same day, dvgrn added discussion of "implicit permissions" to Help:User pages.

I believe dvgrn's addition of the idea of "implicit permissions" contradicts the basic rule "Do not edit other people's user pages without their permission". Permissions should be stated explicitly.
In cases when a user page is "deliberately designed as collaborative collection point", that can be stated explicitly by the creator of the page, providing a permission to edit the page. (For example, the page User:Sokwe/interesting oscillators says "Feel free to edit this page." from the first revision.)

Most of those edits happened before the relevant rule was written explicitly.
However I think it was always a common-sense rule of thumb that user-namespace pages are created and edited by the same person.

Yup, all true. And those linked user pages are all "collaborative collection point" type pages, where it makes sense for multiple LifeWiki editors to contribute when something new shows up that can be added.

I've added a sentence to the Policies and Guidelines page to call out that particular type of user page.

I've also moved over into the Help pages a longer set of "Help:User pages" rules and regulations, which Nathaniel wrote up over a month ago, but never got around to moving into the LifeWiki: namespace.