[WikiEN-l] Tony Sidaway on the "Mark Sweep, Guanaco et al" application to the Arbitration Committee

[Tony Sidaway]

I've decided to recuse as a clerk in this one, mostly in order to say
this: this case is about userboxes.

More specifically, it is about the extremely destructive but widely
denied effects on our community of the creation in template space of
very large numbers of templates that have as their sole purpose the
viral propagation of political opinions and the linking together of
Wikipedians according to those opinions. Sometimes the highly
politicised templates contain links to categories, which have the
effect of linking the users of these templates in a network according
to political opinion. This network is incompatible with Wikipedia's
principle of neutrality and has been openly used (for instance in the
Catholic Alliance case) in deliberate and conscious attempts to
subvert that policy.

There is nothing that can be said in a template that cannot already be
said by keying or pasting into a page the equivalent sequence of wiki,
html and css code. There is no meaning that cannot be conveyed by such
sequences of code . Therefore these political templates, by
facilitating the replication of their contents, and through the
category and whatlinkshere mechanisms, have as their sole function the
systematic destruction of the neutrality policy.

The arbitration committee must decide whether its principal purpose is
to uphold and defend the culture that has gotten us this far, or
merely to enforce some of the written rules that are being used to
mock and trample that culture. Whether to preside over the recovery of
Wikipedia from one of the most massive challenges to its neutral,
welcoming culture, or to read its death sentence. --Tony Sidaway
14:16, 6 March 2006 (UTC)