I've decided to recuse as a clerk in this one, mostly in order to say this: this case is about userboxes.

More specifically, it is about the extremely destructive but widely denied effects on our community of the creation in template space of very large numbers of templates that have as their sole purpose the viral propagation of political opinions and the linking together of Wikipedians according to those opinions. Sometimes the highly politicised templates contain links to categories, which have the effect of linking the users of these templates in a network according to political opinion. This network is incompatible with Wikipedia's principle of neutrality and has been openly used (for instance in the Catholic Alliance case) in deliberate and conscious attempts to subvert that policy.

There is nothing that can be said in a template that cannot already be said by keying or pasting into a page the equivalent sequence of wiki, html and css code. There is no meaning that cannot be conveyed by such sequences of code . Therefore these political templates, by facilitating the replication of their contents, and through the category and whatlinkshere mechanisms, have as their sole function the systematic destruction of the neutrality policy.

The arbitration committee must decide whether its principal purpose is to uphold and defend the culture that has gotten us this far, or merely to enforce some of the written rules that are being used to mock and trample that culture. Whether to preside over the recovery of Wikipedia from one of the most massive challenges to its neutral, welcoming culture, or to read its death sentence. --Tony Sidaway 14:16, 6 March 2006 (UTC)