[WikiEN-l] Userboxes: A radical proposal

[Jimmy Wales]

Angela wrote:
> You can take away user pages, but you won't remove the desire for
> users to express themselves and explain who they are. I expect we'd
> see signatures becoming more like mini-user pages rather than being a
> link to a user page if you did this. I think the main danger here
> would be losing a sense of community if there was no way of finding
> out anything about a person and everyone became anonymous. We need to
> remove the "hands off it's mine" view of user pages, not remove the
> user pages. It's not the pages themselves that are the problem.

I agree.  The more I think about this, the more I refine my view of what
I think is "the problem" with these userboxes.  "The problem" is not
people's self-expression, the problem is that by having these things in
the Template namespace we are implicitly suggesting that these are
endorsed by the Wikipedia community, and that plastering a bunch of
advocacy stickers on your userpage is the right and normal way to be a
good Wikipedian.

One of the reasons we've always been so successful is deep and profound
respect for individuality, *mostly* manifested by a willful abandonment
of advocacy in our interactions and work.  I show my respect for other
people's individuality by not shouting about my own worldview, and I
admire and respect others who do the same.

This is why I've become more and more convinced that the right thing to
do is to take any and all userboxes which don't fit some very very
narrow "practical" uses into people's personal userspace.  If you want
to decorate your userpage with your advocacy for the death penalty and
support for animal rights and so on, well, you know, whatever.

I think it's lame, but whatever.

However, that does *not* mean that I am complacent about having these
things in a common space which seems to suggest not just "well,
whatever" but "here's the thing you're supposed to do!"

If I wasn't such a slow editor, and if I knew how to run a bot, I'd be
likely to create a huge massive stir by going through every single
template in the problematic categories and edit every single user page
to subst them and/or move them to user space, deleting them all as I go.

Please no one else do this... yet. :)


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