Both sides seem to be treating the userbox conflict as some sort of law-enforcement issue. It's either something like: "We need to show those darn n00bs that they can't get away with this!" Or something like: "We need to show those renegade admins that they can't get away with this!"

(Caricaturing slightly, of course.)

But it seems to me like this is better treated as an *educational* issue. We need to calmly and carefully explain how some things, if you put them on your userpage, make you look stupid. And - much more importantly - how they make the project look stupid.

When people new to the project come upon userpages full of neat standardized boxes expressing all sorts of opinions they don't think: "Aha, these users have gone out of their way to make pretty userpages." The impression given is rather: "The Wikipedia project provides users with a built-in mechanism to express standardized sound-bite views about a bunch of topics."

This is not the impression I think we want to give. I'm all for people expressing their opinions and points of view creatively on their userpages (sure, why not, I like reading userpages and it's often helpful to know where people are coming from). But when it looks like the Wikimedia foundation is encouraging people to hold over-simplified views on complicated issues like, say, EU-enlargement, then that is not such a good thing.

Thoughts?

Haukur