From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Fastfission
Taking care of these issues as *general* issues and not related to one specific fad is the way to extinguish whatever actual problems there are without being idiosyncratic and draconian about it.
Seems to me that userboxes are the symptom, rather than the cause, of a certain malaise in Wikipedia.
I'd like to see moves toward encouragement and co-operation, rather than demonisation.
If frivolous userboxes are causing a load on the server that noticably slows down the site for everybody, then that is cause to act with speed and authority, but short of that, any high-handed remedy is merely going to fuel the fire.
If people are using Wikipedia to play rather than build an encyclopaedia, then they should be encouraged in this primary objective, not castigated for extraneous activies, because for every frivolous userbox, I dare say if I went looking, I could find some other piece of useless guff on the user pages of experienced editors. Let people play, if it does no harm and they are participating in community activities, but also encourage them to be more productive.
On BookCrossing.com, we have a couple of numbers that appear after the names of users, and these show the level of participation in the general activity of the site. Perhaps it might be useful to add in some numbers after Wikipedia names, and I'd suggest number of edits in articlespace and length of membership in days, which would show at a glance a rough idea of how valuable a particular editor is. If that doesn't put too much load on the servers, that is.
Peter (Skyring)