Stan Shebs wrote:
Ryan Delaney wrote:
On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
The scope for abuse of these userboxes has been amply demostrated. They fulfil no function useful to the encyclopedia that isn't done equally well by simply stating one's affiliations on one's user page. They must die.
You really ought to learn to pick your battles. Yes, some people do things on Wikipedia that are less than entirely productive. But some of these things boost community morale and connect people with each other in fun ways. Yes, in an ideal world, we would spend all our time working on the encyclopedia and doing nothing else. But tha door swings both ways. In that world, you would spend all your time working on the encyclopedia, not launching a crusade over trivial crap like this.
Taking a longer perspective, we do have fads that sweep over from time to time. About the time I started, three years ago, lists were a big issue - lots of lists being created and expanded, lots of argument about the value of lists. Now they're just part of the scene, don't get much attention.
Somebody compared userboxes to bumper stickers, and I think it's very apt. While we may dislike seeing cars covered with bumper stickers, we don't (usually :-) ) try to pass laws regulating the number or type of bumper stickers on a car, nor do we try to outlaw the printing of bumper stickers.
Most people try to avoid cars with lots of bumper stickers because they are likely to be rednecks/lefties/greenies and you wouldn't trust them to give you the time.
Similarly, if there are somebody who admire WP so much that they want to be associated with it, even if they don't have anything to contribute to the encyclopedia, that seems like a good thing. In fact, if their language skills are abysmal and their library skills nonexistent, I would rather have them tinkering with user pages and talking about WP with their friends rather than editing on articles proper. For some, I imagine that the user page is a good way to learn about editing without disrupting article development. (It does suggest that we should fine-tune our metrics so that user-space edits are never counted.)
Similarly, "user has too many useless userboxes/user has < 500 article edits" could become a regular "oppose" reason at RfA... after all, if it's bad userboxes and stupid admins who are being targeted here, why not draw the conclusion that "stupid userboxes -> bad admins"?