[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

[Fastfission]

Trying to be rational about this... what are the terms which the
userboxes violate?

1. Aesthetics. I agree, but not much of an argument to make.

2. Bloc voting. Is this against the rules? Is there a good way to
avoid this anyway? Can we say we have or want to have a policy against
*enabling* bloc voting (since userboxes do not compell someone to vote
or even to vote in one way)? "Enabling abuse" is a hard charge when
some of the "abuse" may or may not be formally against the rules, I
think.

3. Copyright issues. These would not be hard to deal with if it
weren't for the bloc nature of the userboxes, in my opinion.

4. Technical problems. Do they hurt the server? Undue strain? Etc.? I
haven't heard that they do but if they did that would be a pretty
straightforward argument. But I'm not sure it is true. (And I'm not
trying to imply you were making this argument, because you weren't.)

5. Fulfill no useful function. Again, a hard line to draw. Neither
does illustrating a user page with images at all, technically. Though
one could argue that such an action -- along with userboxes -- serve
to create a happy user, which is what is essential to Wikipedia
participation.

6. Causing more damage than they do good. This seems like the general
argument and I think it could even count as a rationale to get rid of
something, if it were unequivocally true. I don't know how one would
go about proving this, though. I imagine that, outside of a number of
notable instances, most userboxes live uninteresting lives on user
pages.

Other approaches? In any event, I think a good argument has to be made
along lines of this sort to really compel policy. Otherwise there is
just going to be a lot of antagonism. If the real gripes are
individual users who abuse userboxes, there are other ways to deal
with that without alienating those who happen to enjoy them. It is not
a mystery that people like to self-identify their interests and
qualities, as I'm sure you would acknowledge.

As an aside, personally I think just ignoring them will cause them to
go away for the mostpart. I could be wrong, but this is just my guess.
Calling it a "fad" is, I think, completely apt, and fads are -- by
definition -- short-lived.

FF


On 1/3/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> December 2005 saw a fivefold increase in edits on pages in template
> space whose titles started with the characters "User_".  From about
> 1200 in November, the number of such edits rose to 6100.
>
> Userboxes started innocously enough, first seeing widespread use with
> the Babel project, intended to inform users of one another's language
> skills.  But they haven't stayed that way.  From helping editors to
> locate one another by skill, they have evolved into a way for editors
> to group by conviction.  Last month one editor used userbox
> information to locate dozens of people who shared his religious
> persuasion in an overt attempt to destroy the consensual
> decision-making process of Wikipedia.  The religious userbox page
> (yes, such a page exists) lists some fifty userboxes intended to
> identify and group editors by expressed religion.  There is also a
> page for grouping according to political ideology.
>
> The scope for abuse  of these userboxes has been amply demostrated.
> They fulfil no function useful to the encyclopedia that isn't done
> equally well by simply stating one's affiliations on one's user page.
> They must die.
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