[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

[Brian]

>Meanwhile, many users *like* userboxes, silly though they may be.  It keeps
>them happy, which means they stay and make more productive edits.
>Conversely, if we tell all those users their views don't count and they
>should stuff it, we will lose editors.  (I've already seen some leaving
over
>the current mess.)

>The Wikipedia community exists to write the encyclopedia, no other reason;
>but if we alienate a large section of the community, the encyclopedia won't
b>e written nearly as well.

>SCZenz

I think that a lot of the problem has come from the fact that a lot of these
new users spend very little time actually editing the encyclopedia. I did a
random scan of contributions of some of the people who signed the RFC and
found a lot of them were not actively editing in article space. It's no
surprise that they don't have a complete understanding of how it works.
There's a lot of people involved against Kelly's RFC that are both not
regular editors of Wikipedia and are causing a great deal of disruption.