[WikiEN-l] Grandfathering: an initiative to deprecate the spread of userboxes that are divisive

[Tony Sidaway]

I welcome Jimbo's forthright statement that "political or, more
broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project", and his
thoughtful and considerate request that editors contemplate helping to
reduce the userbox culture by "simply removing your
political/religious/etc. userboxes and asking others to do the same.
This seems to me to be the best way to quickly and easily end the
userbox wars."

I know this is going to meet resistance, so I'm trying to think of a
way in which those who think that expressing their opinions on their
userpages helps wikipedia and have so far chosen to do so using
userboxes, can be asked to do so in a way that doesn't contribute to
the very divisive culture that has ground up specifically around
userboxes.

I've come up with a suggestion as follows:

1. that if he disagrees with Jimbo's request, the user should instead
consider using the subst command to place the content of the template
directly into  his userpage. This would reduce the "viral"
transmission of userboxes somewhat and, for the user, it would have
the benefit of divorcing the fate of parts of his userpage from the
fate of individual userboxes--whether editing or deletion.

2. that having done this, he should take the opportunity to edit the
text so that it more precisely expresses his individual views.  In my
opinion this would be more in keeping with the *good* effects of
userboxes in enabling self-expression, while being more in keeping
with the principle that Wikipedia is a wiki in which we edit content,
and not a cookie-cutter website in which we reduce our complex beliefs
as individuals into regimented blocs that serve no purpose but to
emphasize the cultural divisions.

I think of this as "grandfathering".  Ultimately we should be able to
foster a benign culture of fearless expression of our editorial
biases, without enabling the  subversion of our relatively fragile
neutrality principle by alliances between single-issue
campaigners--however justifiable they may feel this subversion to be.