Meanwhile, many users *like* userboxes, silly though they may be. It keeps them happy, which means they stay and make more productive edits. Conversely, if we tell all those users their views don't count and they should stuff it, we will lose editors. (I've already seen some leaving
over
the current mess.)
The Wikipedia community exists to write the encyclopedia, no other reason; but if we alienate a large section of the community, the encyclopedia won't
b>e written nearly as well.
SCZenz
I think that a lot of the problem has come from the fact that a lot of these new users spend very little time actually editing the encyclopedia. I did a random scan of contributions of some of the people who signed the RFC and found a lot of them were not actively editing in article space. It's no surprise that they don't have a complete understanding of how it works. There's a lot of people involved against Kelly's RFC that are both not regular editors of Wikipedia and are causing a great deal of disruption.