[WikiEN-l] Userboxes: A radical proposal

[Steve Bennett]

On 2/17/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I find Mark Gallegher's response to this suggestion very appropriate.
> This is how I relate to user pages. I see an edit by an unfamiliar
> name.  I wonder, "What is this user about?" I go to their user page
> and if they have an expressive page I can get a quick grasp of who we
> are dealing with. They same thing can be done by looking at a few
> dozen edits, but either a well thought out or a nutty user page
> usually tells all.

This is interesting. I confess to never doing this at all (which makes
me totally unqualified to participate in a debate on userpages, never
having seen more than about 2 or 3 :)). I seem to form my impressions
by what people say on talk pages, or occasionally what other people
have said on their talk pages. I'm somewhat wary of the great discord
that can exist between what people say they do, and what they actually
do. Wikipedia is one of the rare instances where you can quickly check
what people actually do.

Steve