On 1/10/06, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com>
wrote:
Peter Mackay wrote:
<snip>
If people are using Wikipedia to play rather than build an encyclopaedia,
then they should be encouraged in this primary objective, not castigated for
extraneous activies, because for every frivolous userbox, I dare say if I
went looking, I could find some other piece of useless guff on the user
pages of experienced editors. Let people play, if it does no harm and they
are participating in community activities, but also encourage them to be
more productive.
The difference is experienced users tend to contribute to article space
as well. Many userbox fanatics make minimal or no edits to articles. (Of
course, most people with userboxes aren't fanatics; I have quite a few
userboxes myself. But there are a few rogue bunch out there who seem
more intent on userboxes than building an encyclopedia.)
Take a look at the edits of [[User:Jimbo Wales]] and [[User:Anthere]].
There are productive things to do other than edit articles. (This is
not at all to knock their contributions, it is instead to knock the
notion that article count means everything).
Or [[User:Kelly Martin]]. I count one article edit in the last 500,
though I might have missed a few.
Deleting userboxes is as productive toward the goal of creating an
encyclopedia as creating them.