On 1/7/06, Sam Spade samspade.thomasjefferson@googlemail.com wrote:
[On taking away userboxes to see what happens]
This is not only completely illogical, it underscores how out of touch admins can get. Intentionally taking away a source of joy from large numbers of users in a bid to see if they'll leave, or if they'll just accept your hegemony over them... thats pretty much the opposite of my recipe for success in a volunteer setting.
Well, you should understand that I'm only talking here about userboxes that are potentially harmful to the project. Boxes that are used to attack people or groups (anti-Jewish and anti-Scientologist boxes have appeared, and of course anything
There's also a problem where newer users see this as a freedom of expression issue and wrongly believe that they have some kind of US-constitution style protection over what they say on their user pages.
I don't think it's overdramatizing to say that these people are in general treating Wikipedia as some kind of hosting or social site. If that is what they're here for, they're not volunteers but freeloaders.
One way to find out is to take away their freebies and see how many leave. Another would be to look at the people who have voted in the userbox controversy and see if significant numbers are in fact contributing anything to the encyclopedia. Many of them aren't, but we don't have any quantification there. If dealing with the issues arising from userboxes strains our administration, we should let these people go.