We agree about harmful or threatening talk page content, altho where
do we draw the line? I find communism and satanism threatening
myself...
As per the clueless newbies, we completely disagree. My opinion is
that chasing them off instead of mentoring them damages the project in
a way immeasurably greater than user boxes, no matter how stupid they
are.
Sadly, too many people forget what admins are for. Admins are here to
help users, and maintain the project. We should never think things
like :
"these clueless newbies and their dumb ideas are a real bother to us
admins. Lets delete their user boxes and give them a serious scolding!
Then maybe they'll go away and us admins won't have so much work to
do"
Because that is how you kill a volunteer project. Wikipedia is not a
social club for admins and old hands, its a growing internet phenomena
designed to offer access to the sum total of human knowledge to
everyone. To do that, we need more help, not less.
Sam Spade
On 1/8/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 1/7/06, Sam Spade
<samspade.thomasjefferson(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
[On taking away userboxes to see what happens]
This is not only completely illogical, it underscores how out of touch
admins can get. Intentionally taking away a source of joy from large
numbers of users in a bid to see if they'll leave, or if they'll just
accept your hegemony over them... thats pretty much the opposite of my
recipe for success in a volunteer setting.
Well, you should understand that I'm only talking here about userboxes
that are potentially harmful to the project. Boxes that are used to
attack people or groups (anti-Jewish and anti-Scientologist boxes have
appeared, and of course anything
There's also a problem where newer users see this as a freedom of
expression issue and wrongly believe that they have some kind of
US-constitution style protection over what they say on their user
pages.
I don't think it's overdramatizing to say that these people are in
general treating Wikipedia as some kind of hosting or social site. If
that is what they're here for, they're not volunteers but freeloaders.
One way to find out is to take away their freebies and see how many
leave. Another would be to look at the people who have voted in the
userbox controversy and see if significant numbers are in fact
contributing anything to the encyclopedia. Many of them aren't, but
we don't have any quantification there. If dealing with the issues
arising from userboxes strains our administration, we should let these
people go.
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