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)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG