[WikiEN-l] Proposal on userbox disagreement

[Kelly Martin]

On 1/3/06, SCZenz <sczenz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Userboxes in general are silly.  This doesn't justify unilateral
> action, which is what people have been asking you to aknowledge.

Since I did not take unilateral action on the basis that "userboxes
are silly", I see no reason to acknowledge this.  Were I to publicly
acknowledge this, it would be taken as an admission that I deleted the
userboxes I did because they were "silly".

> 2. That there are copyright issues with userbox images.  Those have to
> be dealt with, but unilateral deletion wasn't the right solution there
> either--removing the images would've sufficed.

I've grown tired of removing the same image from the same userbox
repeatedly.  I dealt with this issue a while back, and I'm tired of
it.  And I can't block effectively block these people, as their admin
buddies will just unblock them and whine.

> 3. I've also heard (from Tony, I'm not sure if you've said it), that
> many userboxes are being used for inappropriate vote-garnering.  If
> that's true, we can darn well build a consensus to delete them.

I did delete several templates because I felt that they facilitated
dividing Wikipedians amongst factional lines.  It is my opinion that
this is harmful to the encyclopedia, a position which flows from
comments made by Jimbo on this list.  I deleted those templates
because I believe that content that harms the encyclopedia has no
place or purpose and violates several of our core policies.  I'm not
sure that it would have been "better" for me to try to spur a
discussion: my experience is that discussions on Wikipedia go nowhere
when they are made in the hypothetical, absent any actual controversy.
 Perhaps I could have nominated a few of them for deletion, but that
would not have raised the underlying question (the templates in
question would likely merely have been deleted as "silly" without
reaching the underlying issues, and/or a few users would have gone
ballistic and melted down all over the project, and the entire problem
would have recurred in three months).  I certainly did not expect the
explosive shitstorm that occured; I underestimated the degree of the
attachment that at least some of the userboxers held for their
userboxes, and the shallowness of their committment to the project,
and I underestimated the extent to which  the "process before product"
mentality has spread through the community.

I therefore accept culpability for incorrectly assuming that
Wikipedians would put the project of writing the encyclopedia ahead of
their personal amusement, and for failing to realize the degree to
which Wikipedians have become process-bound (and, apparently
hierarchical).  As a longer-term and respected Wikipedian, I do feel
that I have failed in my responsibility to indoctrinate newer
Wikipedians in the Tao of Wiki, and that this failure has led to many
of the problems we have today.

Kelly