Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 1/3/06, slimvirgin@gmail.com slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Tony, I agree these are a problem, but I'm not very familiar with them, so I have a question. What is the difference between having a box on your page saying you're e.g. Hindu, and having yourself listed in a Hindu Wikipedians category?
None. It is the categorization that is the problem, facilitated to some extent by the convenience of userboxes (the ease of typing {{user bigendinan}} compared to "[[Category: Bigendian wikipedians]]).
Categorization people by skill or by services provided is a good use of user boxes. But the beliefs and religions userboxes provide a handy telephone book for people interested in pushing a point of view an unscrupulous enough to spam user talk pages or contact likely supporters by email.
The categories must die too.
But people have been doing that all along by making lists of like minded users on their user pages, all watching the same articles, setting up WikiProjects, etc. I think the difference is that the number of editors is now so large that some special-interest topics can now have 20-30 who share a POV, many of whom are new and/or have never had enough contact with the generalists to pick up the right habits of thought. The userboxes look more like a symptom rather than a cause.
It would be interesting to have some way in which specialists can't form a "consensus" completely unilaterally, in the way that university departments bring in members of other departments for tenure evaluations and the like, trying to prevent inbreeding.
Stan