On Sat, 13 May 2006 11:16:42 +0100, you wrote:
Some of them were blatant trolling, of course. Others are informative but irrelevant to the process of building an encyclopaedia.
They are no more irrelevant to the process of building an encyclopedia than most userpages already are (take mine, for example). Yet nobody calls for the deletion of those userpages on the grounds that they are "divisive" or "inflammatory".
You miss the point: your userpage is not made available through a mechanism which implies that it is officially sanctioned.
It is highly doubtful that any significant amounts of server resources are at stake.
Nor does it need to be since the benefit to the encyclopaedia is zero and the cost non-zero.
It is doubtful that the cost is greater than that of having userpages. Quite to the contrary, using categories and "What Links Here", the userboxes produce semi-automatic organisation and structure. This reduces cost.
The cost is necessarily greater than the user pages, because the templates are rendered within the user pages by transclusion. Nobody (that I know of) has prevented the creation of user categories, which serve the limited practical benefit. I see no encyclopaedic benefit from being able to collect together all users who self-identify as, say, pro-choice - and plenty of disbenefits given the way some editors choose to use Wikipedia - but I don't discount the possibility that user categories might serve some encyclopaedic purpose.
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.
The argument is irrelevant (because, as I already pointed out, it equally applies to userpages, a list of which can be created on [[Special:Allpages]]). It is the typical kind of argument people come up with hastily when they're just looking for something to corroborate their theory or to further their goal.
And as I pointed out, not it doesn't apply *equally* to userpages. But in the end this debate has already been had, and settled. Which was my original point. I see no great benefit from rehashing it.
It is odd that, instead of precluding those "endlessly protracted" discussions, you think you are solving the problem by instead forbidding certain userboxes entirely, while it is plainly obvious that this controversial prohibition causes a lot more discussion. There is nothing wrong with a userbox stating "This user accepts Ayn Rand's philosophy" -- there is, rather, something wrong with someone going "OMG this userbox is divisive, it must go!!" So prohibit the latter.
Look back a short way on the list and in the arbitration queue and so on. Trust me, the debates were massively disruptive. Massively. And nobody is "forbidding" anything - only saying that it should not be done through transclusion from Template space.
Guy (JzG)