[WikiEN-l] Userboxes situation "not acceptable"

[Jeffrey M. Smith]

On Wednesday 15 February 2006 23:15, Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 2/16/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So where the hell are all of these new ones coming from?
>
> Good question!  About 35 editors have more than 100 edits to userboxes
> (quite a small number of people, really).

If it's possible to extract this information from the database, it would be 
helpful to find out who it is that's *creating* all these userboxes--not just 
who's editing them.  Using myself as an example, I'm probably one of the "one 
or two with around 300" edits, but (IIRC) I've only created a single userbox.  
My number of edits is in the hundreds, though, because I went through and 
subst'd out the {{Userbox}} template in hundreds of existing userboxes; this 
was part of a strong push to bring userboxes into compliance with [[WP:AUM]] 
(avoid using meta-templates), which was tagged as official policy at the 
time.  Such subst'ing, as well as the removal of fair use images in 
enforcement of item 9 of [[WP:FUC]], would also probably account for much of 
other Wikipedians' high edit counts on userbox templates.  (I'm fairly 
certain that this is the case for [[User:Silence]], for example.)

If it is possible to distinguish between userbox edits and userbox template 
creation when querying the database, that might go a long way in figuring out 
where these 2500 new userboxes have come from and what they're used for.   
(I'm quite surprised at this number, myself.)  Perhaps I don't have a good 
understanding of the scale of userbox usage, but it wouldn't surprise me all 
too much if many of those 2500 (or the 3500 before them) are used on only a 
single user page (or aren't used anywhere at all).

-- 
[[User:Jeffrey Smith]] <wikipedian at jeffsmith.us>