Tony Sidaway wrote:
From the above figures we can see that the growth in political userboxes, whose *sole* purpose is to link an editor into a handy group that enables them to operate as a political bloc, has been some tenfold.
They must die.
Funny, that's the *sole* purpose? Because I happen to have {{user Democrat}} on my user page. I have it there because I feel it's beneficial for editors to share their background and personal views, so as to make it easier for someone else to judge bias that may creep into their edits. (If it's doing more than creep in, userboxes are the least issue!)
Templates and categories are hardly intrinsic to the sort of factional groupings that are being discussed- look at the old WikiProject for Decency. That was just an ordinary page- and who's to say such organizing would necessarily happen on Wikipedia itself? A competent conspiracy would be subtle.
Understand this: I use a userbox to make my background clearer, in the same sense I note on that page that English is the only language I have a functional use of and that I use US customary units- to help others see why I write what I write. I strongly oppose any attempts to organize oppositional factions within Wikipedia, like WPfD, the AFD for [[Gay rights in Iraq]] where one user went around to all Wikipedians that identified themselves as Catholic and asked them to delete the article (which was, correctly, kept, and the dishonest manipulations noted), or any similar action.
Personally, I'd like to see anyone attempting to factionalize Wikipedia and conspire to manipulate votes and article content banned from all Wikimedia projects for life, and all their edits deleted from history as if they were copyvios, but that's me.
-- Jake Nelson
(I'm just catching up on the mailing lists... may be a bit behind discussion)