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

[Carbonite]

On 1/21/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think that one of the reason more users aren't using subst is
because they don't know the option exists. During one of today's
discussions, one of the strongest and most vocal supporters of
userboxes asked me to fill him in on the "secret" of subst. He had
been complaining about the userboxes on his user page being changed
without his consent, but seemed to be unaware of what subst even was.
Ideally, I'd like to see all POV userboxes exist only as code that was
pasted onto a user's page. If this isn't feasible, then strongly
encouraging the use of subst might be the next best option.

On a related matter, can anyone come up with even one good reason why
user categories should be part of POV userboxes? In fact, can anyone
come up with a reason why we have POV user categories at all?

Carbonite