Well, thats exactly the problem. Such userboxes tend to stir up a hornet's nest, and other users who are involved in related articles may become defensive as a result.
For example, say you edit an article about Israel or Palestine. I go to your userpage and I see political issues you advocate. Then I start believing in you being a Zionist or Antisemitic (or whatever) and treat you as such. This seems to be the typical process especially on controversial issues.
Especially new users get unnecessarily excited over such statements of political views on userpages. Even oldies have a hard time when you see views that are very unpleasant. For example imagine a userbox in support of the viet cong and a vietnam veteran seeing it who otherwise is a rational person on even issues related to the vietnam war.
Userboxes are to comply with WP:NPOV. Why shouldn't they? If people want to advocate their political views they can do so on their own site, not on wikipedia.
On Jan 26, 2008 2:12 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
<joke>I have a dream, that one day my four little adoptees will be judged not by their userboxes but by the content of their contributions</joke>
I say we ignore the userbox problem. Seriously. The kind of person who would have userboxes advocating for killing or pedophilia is just the kind of POV pusher that gets burnout or is weeded out through poor behavior. The vast majority of good Wikipedians know that inflammatory userboxes are a bad thing.
On Jan 19, 2008 1:09 PM, Richard Symonds hawkertyphoon@hotmail.com wrote:
Firstly, there's the issue of inflamatory userboxes. It appears that>
userboxes supporting American troops in Iraq are acceptable, but
userboxes>
supporting the Iraqi insurgensy aren't. Userboxes supporting the
killing
of> >Iraqi insurgents are acceptable, but ones that support the killing
of>
American troops aren't. Surely both the "support" ones should be
acceptable,> >whilst the ones that support killing should be delete.
Then
there's the ones> >that advocate peodophilia. Users who have these often argue that we accept> >homosexual userboxes, which is just a stupid argument, but they don't seem> >to be able accept that. >The answer is,
of
course, to ban all such userboxes and be done with>it. Trying to decide
what
it is and isn't acceptable to express>support for is just asking for trouble.
Or, of course, to accept them all. As long as the userboxes dont
actually
*kill* troops, or *engage in* paedophilia, there are no policies against
it,
are there? We shouldn't have *any* bias here, pro- or anti- anything. _________________________________________________________________ Get Hotmail on your mobile, text MSN to 63463! http://mobile.uk.msn.com/pc/mail.aspx _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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