On 1/3/06, SCZenz sczenz@gmail.com wrote:
- 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".
- 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.
- 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