On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, Nathan Russell wrote:
If users are engaging in personal attacks, racism, homophobia, or what have you in userboxes, talk pages, wikipedia_talk pages, or anywhere else on WP, that should be dealt with in terms of WP:NPA, WP:CIVIL, and their sister policies. Not in terms of userboxes being a bad thing, but in terms of some userboxes (and some users' use of userboxes) being disruptive to the community and being individually taken to TFD as such.
If I make a user subpage [[User:Pakaran/Why Someuser is a big fat bastard]], then that does not mean that user subpages are bad. It means that I made a bad use of that user subpage, and *I* should be dealt with (and the page should probably be deleted, etc).
I have to agree with Nathan here. The arguments I've seen for the thesis "Userboxes are bad" include:
* they misuse wikipedia's Fair Use guidelines * they enable zealots with similar POVs to find each other * they cause divisiveness * they are an unnecessary burden on the servers * there are Wikipedians who spend more time on Userboxes than on contributing to the rest of Wikipedia
All of these arguments can be dealt with effectively on a case-by-case basis. No template or userbox should have Fair Use images: Jimbo has spoken & that should be that. People of the same POV have always found each other on Wikipedia, & Userboxes are hardly a powerful new tool to accomplish this. If a userbox can be construed as a personal attack (e.g., "This use believes anyone who uses MS Windows is lame"), then it should be shot on sight.
No one has supplied any details on how Userboxes effect the servers. This would be something important to know -- & decisive in this matter; by this, if I mean if Userboxes could be shown to have a measurable effect on the servers, then the developers should disable this feature, end of argument. If they have no measurable effect on the servers, then I find it hard to worry much about them.
As for the matter that some Wikipedians spend more time on Userboxes than contributing content, if this is the case then someone needs to have a talk with the person & explain that the goal of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia -- not a web page with lots of cute & colorful Userboxes. If they refuse to get with the program, then perhaps the solution then would be to either treat them like a vandal or haul them before the ArbCom for an official banning. (And if anyone is curious, I can identify one person who falls into this category -- so there are people with accounts on Wikipedia who need to get with the program.)
Honestly, I don't see how putting a couple of userboxes on one's user page transforms the average Wikipedian into some drooling, lamer noob who uses Wikipedia only to hang with his bro's & to pick fights with his unkewl rivals. And for the record, while I have a few of these things on my User page, I find this phenomena silly -- like Sailor Moon anime, teen-aged Republicans, & people who can't understand the difference between "your" & "you're". However, I can cheerfully ignore it & spend my time on more important matters, like compiling material in order to add to Wikipedia an article on every population center in Ethiopia. Indeed, I've spent about an hour writing this email that I could have devoted to this project; I wonder how many more hours have been squandered on this subject.
Well this is my last email on the matter -- if I can help it. If I post to this thread again, I'll have to find some suitable way to do penance for my weakness.
Geoff