People should be allowed and encourage to develop their personal identity on Wikipedia, so long as they are also working on the encyclopedia.
Wikipedia survives because editors feel loyalty to it, because they keep coming back, because they invest in it psychologically. This should be encouraged.
It is only at the level when such activities really start to interfere with the activities of others that we should be arrogant enough to step in.
If the sigs interfere with editing, posting, discussing, etc., then we should encourage the users to change them and, if they are a serious disruption (and many people agree to this), perhaps change them forcibly after a few polite times asking them to change them.
Otherwise we should leave well enough alone. The entire userbox debate ended up being a pointless waste of time and human resources. In the end very little positive was accomplished by it. A number of good editors were antagonized on both sides of it. Let's try and actively avoid things like this in the future. It is perhaps even more detrimental to the encyclopedia to argue pointlessly over what end up essentially being aesthetic judgments.
I could care less if someone has a cute signature, as long as it doesn't actually get in the way of my editing. It is not my job to enforce aesthetic judgments.
FF
On 6/5/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/5/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
When you see someone with a big, fancy, "cutesie" signature, it is obvious that (a) they spent a lot of time on it, and (b) it is very personal to them, it is part of their identity.
Yes, of course. This isn't something to be encouraged. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l