On Wednesday 15 February 2006 23:15, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 2/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
So where the hell are all of these new ones coming from?
Good question! About 35 editors have more than 100 edits to userboxes (quite a small number of people, really).
If it's possible to extract this information from the database, it would be helpful to find out who it is that's *creating* all these userboxes--not just who's editing them. Using myself as an example, I'm probably one of the "one or two with around 300" edits, but (IIRC) I've only created a single userbox. My number of edits is in the hundreds, though, because I went through and subst'd out the {{Userbox}} template in hundreds of existing userboxes; this was part of a strong push to bring userboxes into compliance with [[WP:AUM]] (avoid using meta-templates), which was tagged as official policy at the time. Such subst'ing, as well as the removal of fair use images in enforcement of item 9 of [[WP:FUC]], would also probably account for much of other Wikipedians' high edit counts on userbox templates. (I'm fairly certain that this is the case for [[User:Silence]], for example.)
If it is possible to distinguish between userbox edits and userbox template creation when querying the database, that might go a long way in figuring out where these 2500 new userboxes have come from and what they're used for. (I'm quite surprised at this number, myself.) Perhaps I don't have a good understanding of the scale of userbox usage, but it wouldn't surprise me all too much if many of those 2500 (or the 3500 before them) are used on only a single user page (or aren't used anywhere at all).