On Sat, 13 May 2006 00:35:30 +0100, you wrote:
You are way behind the curve here, this has been discussed to death.
Forgive me for not reading absolutely every edit to absolutely every page in the Wikipedia namespace, the Wikipedia talk namespace, the Template talk namespace, and whatever else.
And there was me thinking that it was pretty much unavoidable on the mailing list and in Project space for at least a month.
The templates do not provide any additional possibility of proclamation that plain text on the user page wouldn't already provide. Since you agree that the declaration of a point of view on a user page is not in itself wrong, it logically follows that the mere fact that the templates proclaim a point of view does not make them wrong.
Some of them were blatant trolling, of course. Others are informative but irrelevant to the process of building an encyclopaedia.
It is highly doubtful that any significant amounts of server resources are at stake. It is even more doubtful that the load would be significantly increased compared to the current situation which already allows a significant number of humorous (and therefore irrelevant) userboxes. Either way, a proper analysis of the consumption of server resources has not been made.
Nor does it need to be since the benefit to the encyclopaedia is zero and the cost non-zero.
a poor precedent to imply that such declarations are officially sanctioned by including them in template space.
There is nothing about the templates that makes them any more "officially sanctioned" than text on a user page on a Wikimedia-controlled server already is.
So you say. Others disagree. A Template space userbox which is listed in a directory of userboxen appeared to many to imply precisely that: "official" support for divisive userboxen.
Some of them were patently inflammatory, and those were removed first and fastest. Others included unfree images, a problem in itself.
These are separate issues that I am not contesting. A proclamation of any belief is possible without breaching any of those two requirements (not being inflammatory and not using non-free images).
It's a separate issue right up to the point that someone has to make a judgment call about *your* particular userbox. Some felt that the endlessly protracted decisions on each individual userbox (is it divisive to say that you accept or reject Ayn Rand's philosophy?) were an even worse use of time and resources.
Guy (JzG)