On 2/18/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I agree. The more I think about this, the more I refine my view of what I think is "the problem" with these userboxes. "The problem" is not people's self-expression, the problem is that by having these things in the Template namespace we are implicitly suggesting that these are endorsed by the Wikipedia community,
The evidence suggests they are accepted
and that plastering a bunch of advocacy stickers on your userpage is the right and normal way to be a good Wikipedian.
Admitting your POV is the first stage towards atchiveing NPOV.
One of the reasons we've always been so successful is deep and profound respect for individuality, *mostly* manifested by a willful abandonment of advocacy in our interactions and work.
Generaly I've found it's more that the advocates are outnumbered by those who don't care enough to form a POV but do want the advocates to stop being anoying
This is why I've become more and more convinced that the right thing to do is to take any and all userboxes which don't fit some very very narrow "practical" uses into people's personal userspace. If you want to decorate your userpage with your advocacy for the death penalty and support for animal rights and so on, well, you know, whatever.
I think it's lame, but whatever.
However, that does *not* mean that I am complacent about having these things in a common space which seems to suggest not just "well, whatever" but "here's the thing you're supposed to do!"
Do you have any evidence that it does? Most new editors are not really up to speed on the template namespace anyway.
If I wasn't such a slow editor, and if I knew how to run a bot, I'd be likely to create a huge massive stir by going through every single template in the problematic categories and edit every single user page to subst them and/or move them to user space, deleting them all as I go.
Please no one else do this... yet. :)
They can't. Running an authorised bot will get you blocked. Deliberate attempts to make fair use vios harder to trace are also not recomended.
-- geni