[WikiEN-l] Inflammatory userboxes

[White Cat]

Well, thats exactly the problem. Such userboxes tend to stir up a hornet's
nest, and other users who are involved in related articles may become
defensive as a result.

For example, say you edit an article about Israel or Palestine. I go to your
userpage and I see political issues you advocate. Then I start believing in
you being a Zionist or Antisemitic (or whatever) and treat you as such. This
seems to be the typical process especially on controversial issues.

Especially new users get unnecessarily excited over such statements of
political views on userpages. Even oldies have a hard time when you see
views that are very unpleasant. For example imagine a userbox in support of
the viet cong and a vietnam veteran seeing it who otherwise is a rational
person on even issues related to the vietnam war.

Userboxes are to comply with WP:NPOV. Why shouldn't they? If people want to
advocate their political views they can do so on their own site, not on
wikipedia.

On Jan 26, 2008 2:12 AM, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:

> <joke>I have a dream, that one day my four little adoptees will be judged
> not by their userboxes but by the content of their contributions</joke>
>
> I say we ignore the userbox problem. Seriously. The kind of person who
> would
> have userboxes advocating for killing or pedophilia is just the kind of
> POV
> pusher that gets burnout or is weeded out through poor behavior. The vast
> majority of good Wikipedians know that inflammatory userboxes are a bad
> thing.
>
> On Jan 19, 2008 1:09 PM, Richard Symonds <hawkertyphoon at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > > >Firstly, there's the issue of inflamatory userboxes. It appears that>
> > >userboxes supporting American troops in Iraq are acceptable, but
> userboxes>
> > >supporting the Iraqi insurgensy aren't. Userboxes supporting the
> killing
> > of> >Iraqi insurgents are acceptable, but ones that support the killing
> of>
> > > American troops aren't. Surely both the "support" ones should be
> > acceptable,> >whilst the ones that support killing should be delete.
> Then
> > there's the ones> >that advocate peodophilia. Users who have these often
> > argue that we accept> >homosexual userboxes, which is just a stupid
> > argument, but they don't seem> >to be able accept that. >The answer is,
> of
> > course, to ban all such userboxes and be done with>it. Trying to decide
> what
> > it is and isn't acceptable to express>support for is just asking for
> > trouble.
> >
> > Or, of course, to accept them all. As long as the userboxes dont
> actually
> > *kill* troops, or *engage in* paedophilia, there are no policies against
> it,
> > are there? We shouldn't have *any* bias here, pro- or anti- anything.
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