Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney ryan.delaney@gmail.com wrote:
When the house is on fire, you don't hold a discussion. It's been suggested elsewhere that the usera engaged in this fad are not regular editors. They can go back to wherever they came from.
The house isn't on fire.
Have you examined the figures? This is a massive growth. Political and belief-based userboxes have increased tenfold since the end of November. A database check tells me that of our 3500 or so userboxes, 1500 were created in December, and a further 250 have been created in the first three days of January alone. This is a serious push to reform Wikipedia as a network of users linked according to beliefs and preferences that can be accessed by a point-of-view pusher at the touch of a button.
The house is on fire.
OK, so I have about 19,000 pages on my watchlist, and review it about twice a day. The only trend I've noticed since November is a slight uptick in anons engaging in subtle vandalism instead of the "Joey is gay" type, and some cases of "stacked" multiple vandalism by different anons - both worrying trends, since they take longer to analyze. I'm also seeing vandalism staying in, not for the boasted minutes, but hours or days, which I'm discovering by reviewing anons' contrib history further back (many articles are apparently not on any active watchlist).
I have yet to see any userbox-facilitated trashing of articles.
Stan