Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Fri, 12 May 2006 20:04:25 +0100, you wrote:
If you really feel it is necessary to stop people from proclaiming anything about them (not even specifically religions) using templates, you are free to voice this opinion, but you are not entitled to delete any such templates without community concensus.
You are way behind the curve here, this has been discussed to death.
Forgive me for not reading absolutely every edit to absolutely every page in the Wikipedia namespace, the Wikipedia talk namespace, the Template talk namespace, and whatever else.
The redux as far as I recall is that templates proclaiming a point of view are divisive, that the declaration of a point of view on a user page is not in itself wrong even so, but that
The templates do not provide any additional possibility of proclamation that plain text on the user page wouldn't already provide. Since you agree that the declaration of a point of view on a user page is not in itself wrong, it logically follows that the mere fact that the templates proclaim a point of view does not make them wrong.
it is a poor use of server resources to transclude such declarations
It is highly doubtful that any significant amounts of server resources are at stake. It is even more doubtful that the load would be significantly increased compared to the current situation which already allows a significant number of humorous (and therefore irrelevant) userboxes. Either way, a proper analysis of the consumption of server resources has not been made.
a poor precedent to imply that such declarations are officially sanctioned by including them in template space.
There is nothing about the templates that makes them any more "officially sanctioned" than text on a user page on a Wikimedia-controlled server already is.
Some of them were patently inflammatory, and those were removed first and fastest. Others included unfree images, a problem in itself.
These are separate issues that I am not contesting. A proclamation of any belief is possible without breaching any of those two requirements (not being inflammatory and not using non-free images).
Timwi