Well, thats exactly the problem. Such userboxes tend to stir up a hornet's
nest, and other users who are involved in related articles may become
defensive as a result.
For example, say you edit an article about Israel or Palestine. I go to your
userpage and I see political issues you advocate. Then I start believing in
you being a Zionist or Antisemitic (or whatever) and treat you as such. This
seems to be the typical process especially on controversial issues.
Especially new users get unnecessarily excited over such statements of
political views on userpages. Even oldies have a hard time when you see
views that are very unpleasant. For example imagine a userbox in support of
the viet cong and a vietnam veteran seeing it who otherwise is a rational
person on even issues related to the vietnam war.
Userboxes are to comply with WP:NPOV. Why shouldn't they? If people want to
advocate their political views they can do so on their own site, not on
wikipedia.
On Jan 26, 2008 2:12 AM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
<joke>I have a dream, that one day my four
little adoptees will be judged
not by their userboxes but by the content of their contributions</joke>
I say we ignore the userbox problem. Seriously. The kind of person who
would
have userboxes advocating for killing or pedophilia is just the kind of
POV
pusher that gets burnout or is weeded out through poor behavior. The vast
majority of good Wikipedians know that inflammatory userboxes are a bad
thing.
On Jan 19, 2008 1:09 PM, Richard Symonds <hawkertyphoon(a)hotmail.com>
wrote:
> >Firstly, there's the issue of
inflamatory userboxes. It appears that>
>userboxes supporting American troops in Iraq are acceptable, but
userboxes>
>supporting the Iraqi insurgensy aren't.
Userboxes supporting the
killing
of> >Iraqi insurgents are acceptable, but
ones that support the killing
of>
American
troops aren't. Surely both the "support" ones should be
acceptable,> >whilst the ones that support killing should be delete.
Then
there's the ones> >that advocate
peodophilia. Users who have these often
argue that we accept> >homosexual userboxes, which is just a stupid
argument, but they don't seem> >to be able accept that. >The answer is,
of
course, to ban all such userboxes and be done
with>it. Trying to decide
what
it is and isn't acceptable to
express>support for is just asking for
trouble.
Or, of course, to accept them all. As long as the userboxes dont
actually
*kill* troops, or *engage in* paedophilia, there
are no policies against
it,
are there? We shouldn't have *any* bias here,
pro- or anti- anything.
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