Wikipedia talk:Proposed policy on userboxes

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Fresh start

In light of the fact that we were heading down a spiral to nowhere, I've reset the debate to look for a discussion to see if we even want a policy, rather than confusing policies about not wanting policies, and trying to keep track of an incredibly complicated vote/debate we had going. If I've been a dick in doing this, say so here, but also say why, and try to see if we can get a genuine discussion going rather than a straw poll. Thanks. Harro5 06:12, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Begin from fundamental principles

My suggestion, for what it's worth, is that we stop trying to write proposed wordings of rules and "voting" on them. Rather, I think an approach would be to try to get principles (based on core WP values and well accepted precedent) articulated and arrive at consensus (or realise that it can't be arrived at for a particular facet) for the various underlying fundamental questions around userboxes. In fact I thought that was what would be done first, but when Kelly presented a draft I thought, hey, maybe this is farther along and went straight to proposing mods. So if no one else does it by tomorrow, I'll try to make a subpage of the project page that has some principles that we can try to agree on, and ask people to edit them rather than "vote" on them. It's what I should have done in the first place and I apologise to the community for not having done it when I created the page by copying material from WP:VP that User:TantalumTelluride posted, material that I really thought was a good starting point for articulating principles. ++Lar: t/c 06:15, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We need to have a knock-down drag-out brawl over whether to even have a policy first. — Phil Welch Katefan's ridiculous poll 07:02, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's what this is now set up for. Brawl away, to quote you. Harro5 08:02, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think User:Lar's idea may be a good one. I see much of the controversy here as stemming from differences in how people view user pages. The question becomes, what is the fundamental purpose of a user page? Some people appear to emphasize the personal, individual aspects -- free expression, free speech, all that good stuff -- as well as community-building. Others (myself included) appear to focus on the ultimate goal of Wikipedia to be an encyclopedia, and consider anything not conducive to that goal as inappropriate. I suspect reaching consensus on this point (if possible) will make much of the rest of this moot. --DragonHawk 03:39, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It should also be noted that some users consider the personal, individual aspects of a user page as part of the community-building process, which in turn serves the goal of creating an encyclopedia. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 04:04, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Note that "My suggestion, for what it's worth..." was written before the refactoring and restart that user:Harro5 so admirably carried out. I think we are doing better now than we were, but I note that people still are engaging in back and forth on the page. My understanding of how one does policy proposals is that the proposal is a draft, worked on, and that comments occur on the talk pages. So we still could do better at moving comments here, IMHO. That aside I think I want to amplify what User:DragonHawk and user:Josiah Rowe say. The GOAL here is to write an encyclopedia, just as the goal of an automobile factory is to make automobiles. Yet automobile factories have break rooms and candy machines and places where people hang out and talk, and even after hours clubs and activities and on and on and on. Those all have to be evaluated in the context of "do these activities enable the making of better automobiles"? If they do not, they should go. My assertion, and the assertion of many of us, is that much of the WP community (barnstars, april fools jokes, WP:BJAODN, wikimeetups, and many many other things) help editors be better editors and be more prolific editors. WP is not a free speech zone but userboxes, unless they are hateful, are part of commmunity. Yes, like pop bottles from the breakroom in a factory, they can be misused, but it is the misuse we should censure, not the tool. Fundamentally, user boxes, even ones that show POV, are part of WP community and should be cherished. IMHO. ++Lar: t/c 04:22, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well said, Lar. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 04:27, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well said indeed. I'll also add that on Wikipedia there's even more reason to have "break rooms" than at factories, as it's a lot easier and cheaper for us to have to them. Yeltensic42.618 ambition makes you look pretty ugly 15:20, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Furthermore, DragonHawk makes a good point about differing perspectives on userpages. But here's something to think about: allowing more personal, individual userpages still means that other editors are free to have more "encyclopedic" userpages if they want; on the other hand, being stricter and forcing everyone everyone to conform to the latter obviously means that the former isn't allowed. See what I'm saying? The inclusionist way simply allows more options; no one would be forcing you to add unencyclopedic features. Yeltensic42.618 ambition makes you look pretty ugly 15:20, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Protect all existing userboxes as long as this discussion continues

After Kelly´s action some time ago, now all religious userboxes have been speedy deleted. Without any warning or discussion. I think this is outrageous and all userboxes should be protected from now on against this kind of admin vandalism. Larix 09:58, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Both sides in the argument have agreed that there are some userboxes which have got to go. Protecting the lot makes no difference to deleting them; it's purely symbolic. However, symbolically, it does stop administrators deleting userboxes which do need to be deleted. Rob Church Talk 10:16, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There is absolutely no concensus on how to deal with pov userboxes yet. So it is appalling to just massively delete these ones. I'm not talking about wikipedians who believe in santa here, but about humanists, muslims, jews and so on. Larix 10:18, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I find this very upsetting. I fail to see what urgent threat is posed by these userboxes that could not wait two or three days until we hash out some sort of preliminary policy, and I am extremely offended that whoever deleted these userboxes didn't have the common courtesy to post a message somewhere explaining what he/she was doing and why. After the RfC, there is no excuse for that kind of behavior and I don't see how it serves any purpose other than to irritate people. (It's worked; I'm irritated.) The point about userbox proliferation has been made, and the people here are working to remedy the problem. Mass userbox deletion with no explanation given is absolutely uncalled for. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 10:25, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, and even if we had decided that these templates should be deleted, many of the proposals on the table suggest that users should be given the chance to place the code directly on their userpages; deleting the templates AND the pages at Wikipedia:Userboxes prevents this. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 10:29, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is User:Tony Sidaway. deletion log. Larix 10:27, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Userboxes should not be speedied, especially while such discussions are ongoing. Such behavior is certainly uncivil, and should be treated as such. Kaldari 13:08, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I am not certain that 'both sides have agreed that there "are" some userboxes which have got to go'. This seems to be a bold statement. I think that under the current circumstances, boxes should not be restricted. There is already the TfD process for removing templates, and it should work quite well for userbox templates. It would be nice to avoid speedy deletion in user space. --Dschor 13:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fairly sure that general consensus supports any userbox being placed on a user's page, as it is free to be POV. The issue comes from templatised userboxes, and their listing at WP:UBX. I know what my POV regarding categorisation is - that is laid out in proposal #4, but achieving consensus here is going to be very difficult. The final solution would be to ban templatising any userbox, and forcing users to create individual ones for each's page... but that wouldn't be very popular methinks! Deano (Talk) 17:14, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Can't we just not put POV userboxes in categories? This would stop those attacks that happen. The userboxes would still be listed at Wikipedia:Userboxes/Beliefs so users could find them easily, but people wouldn't be able to target large amounts of say...Christians, so attacks would reduce or maybe even dissapear as POV bashers would only see a person's POV if they actually went on their userpage (which they wouldn't know to unless someone said that they has a particular belief, and the attakcer saw it) , instead of finding them on a category. - UK «ßØÛ®ßÖѧ3» Talk | Contrib's 16:21, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • It's not just categories ... there's also the "What links here" page on templates, which would be just as useful for creating POV groups or POV attacks. Userboxes would also have to be subst'd to get rid of this problem. --Cyde Weys votetalk 21:42, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(Note:I'm pro-userboxes). Substing out a userbox is not even a fix, and remving image to avoid what link's here isn't either, as you can always just run a search for the text of the user box, and get a hit list of all the users that way. xaosflux Talk/CVU 03:32, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
2/3 of my attempted edits in the last 5 hours have failed due to server load. I do not know how much that is due to failure of the userboxes we love to comply with WP:AIM, how much is normal for this time of day (I usually editing late nite), or other purposes. Meanwhile the community disruption continues with more players taking over what User:Kelly Martin had quit doing pending resolution of the RFC. User:AlMac|(talk) 20:19, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Use of wikipedia for nonencyclopedic purposes

Little pretty boxes are not the issue. Use of wikipedia for nonencyclopedic purposes is a key issue in the use of pretty boxes. Deal with the real issues and the derived cases take care of themselves. To what extent social behavior on Wikipedia enhances encyclopedia building is highly subjective and no one should contemptuously or arrogantly or high-handedly act as if their assessment is unquestionable. Voting can not make unencyclopedic behavior acceptable, but what does and what does not help build the encyclopedia is no one person's right to decide. I think the real issues are in that mess of words somewhere and policies on pretty boxes are beside the point. WAS 4.250 13:18, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WAS 4.250 cuts to the crux of the matter. I think in that:
  1. Use of images that are being used outside of FU Wiki policy should be speedily deleted (eg templates)
  2. Userboxes are a fad. I saw what others were doing and started adding my own before I saw how silly some had gotten IMHO...but that's just it: my opinion. What does it really matter if someone writes "I am a christain" on their userpage or puts/references a pretty box with a symbol of a cross on it.
  3. Meaningless issue for us to continue wasting time on and too time consuming to police. Let people build userpages as they see fit as long as it does not violate the userpage policy, which is???? --Censorwolf 20:54, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  4. which is WP:UP, I believe. ++Lar: t/c 05:08, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for thr reference, I couldn't find it before I made the post --Censorwolf 17:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What about the Babel boxes? This entire discussion inspire me to re-read WP:UP, and I decided to remove everything from my user page that wasn't related to writing an encyclopedia. I realized that meant removing not only the religious, political, etc., user boxes from my page, but the Babel boxes as well, because frankly, the fact that I have only a basic knowledge of Lower Sorbian is about as relevant to writing an English-language encyclopedia as the fact that I eat meat and was born in the year of the Monkey. If the consensus is that userboxes must be relevant to writing Wikipedia, doesn't that mean the Babel boxes have to go too? --Angr (tɔk) 12:26, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Babel boxes are relevant to the writing of Wikipedia. English Wikipedia may be written in English but a lot of the things we write about (and even a lot of the sources that we use) aren't in English. If someone finds a source in Lower Sorbian but they don't speak it, and you have the Babel box, maybe they can come to you for help with it? That's one possible use of the Babel boxes. But let me reiterate that I fully agree that all Babel/user boxes must be relevant to writing an encyclopedia. --Cyde Weys votetalk 21:37, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I contend that most babel boxes are un-encyclopediatic. On the English site it is only useful to denote if you 1) are not fluent in English or 2) if you are fluent in another language. In the first case, if you make changes to an article, and another editor notices that they don't quite read right, he can check your user page and see that problem wordings are probably just grammatical errors. In the second case, it does allow someone to search for a translator. Any claims that I speak less-than-fluent non-English languages are irrelevant, and one should take as a given that an editor is fluent in English unless he signifies otherwise. This same in-kind principle applies to non-English Wikipedias. (However, I am far from convinced that all unencyclopediatic userboxes should be banned.) — Eoghanacht talk 16:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some hard facts would be helpful

Here is some information I think would make it easier for us to resolve this issue:

  1. We need to quantify the effect that userbox templates have on Wikipedia, in terms of sever load or whatever. This will give us an idea of the urgency of this task and how widespread the change needs to be. I have seen a couple of people make comments vaguely linking userbox proliferation and Wikipedia's fund drive, but correlation does not imply causation. Let's get some hard facts on how userboxes affect Wikipedia.
  2. We need to come up with specific instances where userbox templates have been used for various purposes, good or bad, so that we can evaluate the non-technical issues that have been brought up. If userboxes and their corresponding categories are being used for vote-stuffing, provide examples. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 20:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree for the need for hard facts on server load. If it is 0.02% of the load, then I say let's be open minded and let people have some fun. But if it is 2% of the load, then I would probably agree to delete even the userboxes I created. — Eoghanacht talk 20:38, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • I do agree that some hard facts would be helpful. However, I also feel that server load is a legitimate concern, particularly as userboxes are editted (and recently, deleted and undeleted) with a relatively large frequency, forcing many pages to have caching issues. My view is that a simple "fix" to this would be to encourage users to subst: userbox templates (I've already done that on my user page) - which, incidentally, also affords a certain protection of their userpage is someone decided to vandalize (or delete) their userbox template(s). I say "encourage", not "require" - I don't want to see m:Instruction creep either. --Blu Aardvark | (talk) | (contribs) 21:50, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • It is true that the boxes are frequently edited at this point in time. (The image in the firefox template seems to change every other hour.) I assume that this is so because the idea is still very young, and the really useful boxes are still being developped. (Useful boxes would be project affiliation, and we have no boxes yet that tell us something about peoples expertise.) I am sure there will be less editing once the userboxes are more complete.--Fenice 09:03, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A third way

As Wikipedians, we must always try to make compromises in a fashion that addresses as many people's concerns as possible. As can be seen above, many people have concerns that they feel are best addressed by regulating userboxes in certain ways. Similarly, others have concerns with the idea of regulating userboxes. It is the intent of those working on this proposal to address as many of these concerns as satisfactorily as possible, so we may be advised not to limit ourselves to either "drawing up a set of regulations" or "not doing anything at all". There may be a third way to resolve this.

  • I had this suggestion on the proposals page, but it got lost in the crowd: "Could there possibly be a place like Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals where people propose new userboxes and they are created or not based on that vote? Then, we could create a speedy delete criteria for any new userbox created that hasn't gone through this voting process. At least that would regulate it more than the current scheme (Wikipedia talk:Userboxes/Ideas) which basically sees people say, 'Can someone make this?', and it's done. This keeps the deletionists happy by slowing down the influx of new userboxes, and also allows userboxes on all topics to be created." Harro5 10:36, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: no regulation, please

Regarding the proliferation of user boxes, I find this an endearing and valuable community-building aspect of WP. Since there are few tangible rewards for working on wikipedia, camaraderie is really really important. I think we should enforce that they are all of the form "Template:User ___" but other than that, allow freedom within the normal wp policies.

Regarding POV on user pages: I believe that WP policy allows for POV in the User: namespace (and thus templates used in user space). Moreover, I find specific value in people placing their personal biases and alignments on their user pages. I am under no such delusion that we can ever really escape POV (we can only do our best to approach NPOV), so it is very helpful when checking history or contributions to see where people are coming from. Brighterorange 20:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have not really made up my mind, nor do I think this is too important. However when I see things like:

Template:User against scientology

I think when we get to the point of boxes like this we need to have a policy regulating linking users opposed to certain ideologies. What should be done about things like that? It does seem to be getting out of hand. gren グレン 21:45, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There seems to be an unhealthy amount of boxes denouncing groups rather than supporting your own. Template:User GWB for example. This doesn't need to be on userpages, and belongs on blogs. Wikipedia needs to stay focused, and if your a new user who sees someone revert your edits to Bush's article for example, and go to their userpage, and see that userbox, it's likely you will start a partisan argument about doing the work of the Democratic Party, or being a communist, or some ridiculous thing like that. These userboxes aren't just "fun", they are clear statements that I edit articles with a specific POV related to this debate, and so am going to take badly to opposing views, even if I'd like to claim otherwise. This isn't good for anyone, and so we need to be careful how much free reign e allwo with these templates. Harro5 21:58, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'll agree that such sentiment is unhealthy. But do you think that a policy against such userboxes really addresses the underlying problem? Every editor has POV. Being up front about one's POV in userspace but striving for NPOV in articles is the best scenario, in my view. I don't think a "don't ask don't tell" policy (if that's what you're proposing) does anything except make the problems more insidious. Brighterorange 22:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the user space is a suitable place for such sentiments. An attempt to censor userboxes is harmful to the purpose of user pages. I for one would rather have this information, and appreciate the opportunity to make my POV clear to the community, even as I make my best effort to maintain NPOV in the article space. Censoring user page content that does not violate policy is a poor precedent. --Dschor 23:08, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That particular user box violates several policies and should be deleted. Kelly Martin (talk) 23:49, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Can you list some policies that it violates? Sorry, I am arriving to this discussion late, I guess. Brighterorange 00:22, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It shows a POV. But I don't think it has been clearly shown that having a POV is disallowed in userspace, has it?. Near as I can tell it is not an advocacy, it is not asking other users to dislike Scientology. Jimbo has asked us to deemphasise external beliefs, so it's not a box I'd choose to use, and it's in a category that I would put on the "discouraged" list (I support the notion of discouraged sorts of boxes, although I confess I have a FSM box and an atheist box on my page), but I would not ban/delete it. It MAY contain a copyrighted image (I haven't checked). However the MOST damning thing about it is how bright yellow and orange it is. Those colors are so jarring they must not be suffered to be shown together. (K, kidding about that last part. But they ARE jarring!) ++Lar: t/c 00:44, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What I'm having difficulty figuring out is why many of the userbox opponents a) think that having a POV keeps us from editing NPOV (seriously, almost everyone has a POV on something), b) think that prohibiting userboxes and/or having "don't ask don't tell" keeps anyone from having a POV, c) think that having little decorative boxes on our userpages keep us from writing an encyclopedia, d) think that liberal Wikipedians and conservative Wikipedians necessarily must hate each other, and e) dislike it when userboxes or cats are used to inform editors of a discussion going on (a good example is this discussion, which I and other editors find out about by being contacted through the cats in question). It appears that the only inherently negative use for them is to gang up to win edit wars on articles, something we already have policies to regulate (and not a good reason to delete the boxes or cats, since most good things can be misused, eg "let's make computers illegal since they can be used to send out viruses"). Yeltensic42.618 15:33, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
File:Naziswastika.png This user is vehemently against Jews.
This user is vehemently against Blacks.

Not to be apocalyptic but, what exactly is the line here? I would hope most users would find that unacceptable on a user page? I don't think it would surprise many to know that we do have bigots here. There's a difference. Liberals and conservatives can get along. But it's a different matter for Scientologists and those "vehemently against" Scientologists to get along. Not that they couldn't but, when you needlessly incite that tension it's silly. gren グレン 16:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If a user puts "Vehemently against blacks" on their own userpage, I'm just as happy to know about it; and I will evaluate their comments accordingly. Putting it on someone else userplage should be discouraged; but I think existing policy will do that. Septentrionalis 23:31, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
To me, the line is when a userbox can reasonably be seen to cause offense, such as a userbox that says the user hates Jews/blacks/Scientologists. The definition of 'reasonable' should, of course, be left to the community on a case-by-case basis, but that's where I feel the line in the sand should be. Lord Bob 16:39, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely, we need to get rid of hate templates like those. I was talking about the opponents of userboxes that merely say "This user is liberal", "This user is an atheist" etc. Yeltensic42.618 16:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What about user boxes that say things like "This user is vehemently against abortion"? How about "This user is vehemently against killing babies"? Where do we draw the line? Serious question, here. (Please note these are examples I made up; the specific example is not the point.) --DragonHawk 21:45, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
To work with your example, the line occurs just about right in the middle. Stating "This user strongly opposes abortion" is a harmless statement of principle and is fine by me. Stating "This user strongly opposes killing babies" is setting out to offend, shock, or cause trouble, and is a bad thing. Lord Bob 17:27, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The line is described in existing wikipedia policy and guidelines concerning User Page content. Those boxes would & should be deleted.TCorp 17:00, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, you don't need userboxes to be offensive or POV. See User:Deeceevoice. — TheKMantalk 23:56, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

TCorp, which box are you talking about? The two I created are just code and not boxes... but the "vehemently against Scientology" one is real. That's my problem with this. There is no line for divisive boxes. I would have deleted the against Scientology one as uncivil and bordering attacking if I hadn't know there was controversy in this I didn't want to be involved in. My issue is here. Oh vell.
And DragonHawk, that's what I'm trying to get to. Where do we draw the line... and there seems to be existing policy that is very related to the Scientology one... and definitely to the two fake ones I created. It just becomes problematic when confrontational ones are being kept. I suppose in the long run we will see. gren グレン 04:41, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I was talking about the ones you made. I know that they're not boxes, but I said they should have been deleted. I also voted delete on the scientology box, but not because I'm for scientology, but because I don't like Anti-boxen. I suggested the box be edited to read: This user is against all brainwashing cults. TCorp 15:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As long as derogatory terms regarding ethnicity, etc. does not occur in userboxes, I see absolutely no reason, whatever, for deleting them. This whole issue is about freedom of expression. Right now, I can think only of a very few possible userboxes I'd be in favor of deleting, like if someone made one that stated: "This user is a paedophile and proud of it" or "This user hates all non-caucasians". PC-fascism (that's right, the one does not exclude the other) is seriously uncool. Let's not surrender to it! The 'pedia wants to be free... What's the difference between stating your views on the universe on your userpage in plain text and stating them in a userbox?! That like-minded people can find each other easier with userboxes and gang up on users or groups of users that they're opposed to, regarding one or more issues? That's just totally absurd. Like-minded people find each other all the time anyways. All you have to do is check out who's editing what you also edit, and somewhere in there there'll be someone you sympathize with. So let's not try to stop a river with our bare hands, to quote a Taoist saying... Kind regards, --Twisturbed Tachyon 16:59, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, comparing the rational dislike of an obnoxious, glorified UFO cult like the Scientologists to Nazism's racism and anti-Semitism is far more offensive than the actual anti-Scientologist tag.
Second, to use the oft-quoted SCOTUS line: sunshine is the best disinfectant. An open project such as this is going to inevitably attract evil people (like real bigots) who wish to bend the project to their evil own ends (like making bigotry seem acceptable). But why bother worrying about the overt things such people do like flying their own userboxes? If a bigot wants to express their bigotry through a userbox, then I say be my guest - you want to mark yourself as a bigot, then look forward to thorough checking of your facts and plenty of reversions. It's the covert actions - putting in advocacy of racism under the cover of NPOV, or through sock puppetry - that really threatens Wikipedia's integrity. --Daniel 06:44, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The point is you have to judge the merits of a belief system in order to differentiate like that... and why would wikipedia be judging the merits of two different belief systems? What I did was satire to make a point. A more reasonable exmample is "This user is vehemently opposed to Islam". It doesn't carry the racial baggage of Judaism so it's clearly along the same lines. The thing about bigots is they don't always edit on the pages of what they are prejudiced about. I could hate the Rastas but you wouldn't see it manifest because I don't edit pages relating to the Rastafari movement. If I happen to be editing Donsö it doesn't matter in the least that I'm a bigot. However, if I have a tag that says I'm opposed to the Rastafarian movement and a Rasta is editing the article it creates unneeded tension. Even on related articles it creates unneeded tension because it can automatically make you defensive acting. Integrity of the article is threatened equally either way. Civility is much more likely to be threatened if people use those boxes. gren グレン 14:39, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, gren グレン, in your example, let's imagine you really did hate them, and stated it in plain text on your userpage. Let's say the imaginary Rasta had a picture of Haile Selassie on his/her userpage. Would that not create tension in the same manner? What's next, that we disallow people to put any pictures or statements in writing about their religion, etc. on their userpages? --Twisturbed Tachyon 16:43, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I read this wrong the first time so let me just make sure I'm getting it right. Instead of having a userbox you have it in plain text. Well, firstly it's not institutionalized in templates so it's a purely individual action. There are no categories to link users together by this. Having the code on your page with no template doesn't even bother me as much as having the templates. It also allows for personalization and hopefully you can discuss your views rather than advertise them. I would not advise users having such things on their user page but I do think it's a step above having it in a template. I also think individualization of that kind of thing makes it better. It's not mob response it's personal opinion. Those are the main differences I see. gren グレン ? 21:43, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Plain text, you got it. I just don't see the difference between expressing your views on politics, religion, etc. in plain text on a userpage and expressing them in a userbox. Some users will always oppose each other when their differing opinions clash, regardless if they have userboxes tagging their various orientations or not. Conflicts will always arise, one way or another. Like-minded users will continue to make contact, userboxes or not. Instead of trying to avoid the inevetable, let's deal with it and make the best of our individuality.--Twisturbed Tachyon 14:01, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I always found the userboxes a little off-putting, because I'm a little ambivalent about the whole idea of a Wikipedia "community". It's good for people to be able to find each other and organize themselves, of course, but I think it's a bad idea for people to acquire reputations. Presumably everyone should be equal here, and I think it's unfortunately very tempting in some situations (edit compromises, etc.) to treat people differently based on their standing in the community. I think userboxes are potentially a force for this kind of de-equalization, but after reading this whole damn page and changing my mind several times, I think that having regulations would have more of a de-equalizing effect than any userbox ever could. The more rules there are to enforce, the more authority people can acquire. Equalpants 14:01, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Policies relevant to the userbox debate

I agree with User:Lar that policies can still be relevant even if they don't necessarily apply. Remember also that policies can be changed. So, references to existing policy should not be considered a finding of law, but rather, a pointer to existing concensus which help guide us here. So, to that end, I will add added some sub-topics for individual policy/guideline pages. --DragonHawk 07:06, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User page guidelines

User page guidelines

  • Commentary on what should and should not be on a user page. Ultimately, it appears inconclusive for this discussion. Opinion pieces not related to Wikipedia are discouraged, but community-building is encouraged. --DragonHawk 07:06, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think the most important bit of WP:UP with regard to this discussion is this:
      • "The Wikipedia community is fairly tolerant and offers fairly wide latitude in applying these guidelines to regular participants. Particularly, community-building activities that are not strictly "on topic," may be allowed, especially when initiated by committed Wikipedians with good edit histories. At their best, such activities help us to build the community, and this helps to build the encyclopedia."
    • The same section does discourage "opinion pieces not related to Wikipedia or other non-encyclopedic material", but I don't see how a box stating that a user is a Baptist, a Communist, or a Spaghetti-Monsterist constitutes an "opinion piece". —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 20:41, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • I didn't phrase that very well. In general, I think WP:UP supports the ability to maintain a personal user page with personal opinion details. However, it also repeatedly emphasizes that the overall idea behind user pages on WP is to facilitate the maintenance of an encyclopedia, not to simply let people describe themselves for the heck of it. That's all I was trying to get at. --DragonHawk 02:56, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No personal attacks

No personal attacks

  • A personal attack is a attach on a particular person. By extension, it could be argued that user boxes should not be used to attack a particular person or group of persons. --DragonHawk 07:25, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright policy

  • In the debates that I was involved in regarding userboxes, mainly the Democrat and Republicans, editors who were pro-userboxes states that the Fair Use of images extended into user pages. However, the same people often say that NPOV does not apply to user pages; so where is it that certain policies inexplicably end? Fair Use is not just a guideline; the images are copyrighted, and copyright owners can sue. It's in place for a reason. Eightball 03:36, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agree. I strongly feel that userboxes cannot, must not have copyvio problems. Fair use is for purpose of review and commentary, and nothing else, and I'm not sure I see how showing how you feel about Pepsi, for example, is fair use by any stretch of the imagination. I think the mechaniasm that has been proposed (see the archived older version of the proposed policy page) for sheperding userboxes through a creation process would help address this. ++Lar: t/c 04:26, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • I also agree with Lar very strongly. I know that Wikipedians are creative people, so if people wish to have an icon on their userbox, they should try to be creative and come up with their own icon. However, with some of the recent problems we have been seeing with the servers, it would be each template's creators wishes to include an icon or not. However, it must be under a free license, not fair use. Zach (Smack Back) Fair use policy 04:42, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agree - copyright is an issue for WP as it hosts the images. Copyright violation in a userbox should be speadily dealt with as for any other image copyright violation (i.e. the image should be deleted), as for the rest of the userbox - its validity is discussed elsewhere here. David Ruben Talk 00:55, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think maintaing the GFDL requirements on userpage content (images included) would be beneficial. It would mean that the content of userpages can be freely reproduced without having to verify the copyright status of every element in the page. Screenshots of Wikipedia pages (with images) already appear in media and publications. A third-party would not expect to recieve a C&D from another third-party for publishing something obtained from Wikipedia, even if it's from userspace. This would cast doubt on the veracity of our other copyright claims. —Daelin2006-01-06 10:36:22

Meta Template policy

Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates

According to WP:AUM and WP:AMT (are these two redirects to the same place? [Yes. --DragonHawk]) certain design features, of templates inside templates, contribute mightily to server load, making it difficult for us to edit anything on Wiki. There's also reference to abuse of Categories, which I interpret as applying to WP articles as well as to userboxes.

In my POV opinion, like copyright violation avoidance, server protection policy should be an exception to consensus building.

Now for people like me, who are newbies at image manipulation code, and who get our stuff by copying what someone else got to work, then tweaking one piece at a time until it works, what we need is a HOW TO on getting stuff that does not violate WP:AUM and a version of that page for Dummies unfamiliar with the programming lagnuage involved. User:AlMac|(talk) 17:35, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV policy

NPOV policy

  • WP:NPOV - many userboxes offend against WP:NPOV - NPOV is a concern for articles, not User pages.
    • I will continue to argue strongly that userboxes should be allowed to show POV, but I nevertheless feel that NPOV is a policy that is relevant. it's relevant in that it doesn't apply as strongly (or at all) in userspace and should be mentioned in the list of relevant policies. (while you could argue that every policy that doesn't apply in user space could be mentioned, the POV/NPOVness of boxes seems to be a critical thing that this debate turns on. I think CIVIL bears mentioning here too for the same reason, and it is in fact mentioned just above that bullet. ++Lar: t/c 00:33, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • NPOV has been getting brought up a lot in this discussion. Previous concensus appears to be that user pages are explictly allowed to contain opinion. I see the fact that template namespace is not user page namespace as a technicality; user boxes are, by definition, intended for user pages, and thus can be considered part of user space. OTOH, it does seem somewhat counter to the spirit of the Wikipedia project to fill one's user pages with POV just because we can. Spirit vs letter of the law and all that. --DragonHawk 07:06, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Might I suggest that we create a new "namespace"? Although MediaWiki requires the creation of entirely new namespaces to be done on the server, namespaces may be simulated by the creation of WikiLinks that have a section preceeded by :. For example, we could then put {{User Template:someuserbox}}. While that might be less than optimal (because then template transclusion would require the User Template: prefix), it would take POV userboxes out of the Template: namespace. Robert Paveza 23:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Personally, I don't think the real issue is with the namespace. The namespace distinction is mainly technical. The real issue with NPOV here, I think, is about the intent of Wikipedia. I think, in general, the idea is that POV should be allowed on user pages because that helps others understand one's contributions, and thus contributes towards harmonious editing. However, I don't see that policy as carte blanche to fill one's user page with POV. --DragonHawk 03:04, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • When a group of editors all understand each others' POVs, then they have a much better chance of attaining a NPOV together. For example, if I'm editing depleted uranium, as I sometimes do, then someone who understands my point of view (against it) has a better chance of calling me on my critiques, which keeps me honest, and asking for sources. Similarly, over in global warming, if someone doesn't like my graphing, then it helps if I know their POV so that I can respond to their concerns. When we know each other's POV, then we know how to meet half way. So I would say that user page POV is essential for achieving NPOV. —James S. 11:03, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reading the page now, it says "Having a POV is not the same as advocating one." That's the dumbest statement I have ever heard. Eightball 03:32, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Apart from the fact whether particular userbox can divide the community, unequal treatment of it or the opposing one can further increase the tension. -- Goldie (tell me) 06:36, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is not ...

What Wikipedia is and is not

... an indiscriminate collection of information

... a soapbox

... an anarchy

Wikipedia is not an anarchy

  • Choice bits here: "Wikipedia is not a forum for unregulated free speech" and "Wikipedia ... restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with the purpose of creating an encyclopedia." This is more indirect evidence that the "POV is allowed on user pages" rule perhaps only goes so far. If these user boxes really are interfering with encyclopedic activities, this suggests they do not belong. --DragonHawk 21:33, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's a valid point. However, it should be kept in mind that it is far from proven that user boxes are interfering with encyclopedic activities. A better argument has been made that user boxes with embedded categories are interfering with encyclopedic activities, but even that is questionable. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 03:38, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Key policies

Policies and guidelines

  • Respect other contributors. This is one of the four "key policies" listed, but has no single page of it's own (it actually has several). This policy is extremely relevant to this discussion, I think. I think it's clear that anything, user page or otherwise, which fails to respect other Wikipedians is Not Good. --DragonHawk 07:14, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Categories of User Boxes

With respect to categories that user boxes are in, can we agree that

  • this is a good thing when the user box describes a skill that is in demand, to help Wiki encyclopaedia development, like being able to translate between 2 languages.
  • this is a bad thing when it identifies an interest sub-group that could be used to subvert consensus, or help support general vandalization, and cliques of either ordinary editors or administrators.
  • there is a grey area in between where people say they interested in editing certain topics, or have certain qualifications that can help with verification.

There is an issue of enforcement. As newbies learn how to put things in categories, and use the Special Pages to find stuff that needs better linking, this policy will be violated. People like me who have been members for 6 months, still have lots of Wiki stuff to learn, so in some areas we newbies, in other areas we not. User:AlMac|(talk) 17:10, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, we cannot agree to the above. Categories do not make POV edits. Wikipedians make POV edits, and when they do so, such edits are reverted to maintain NPOV. Userboxes are part of user space, and involved in user categorization. There is no compelling reason to remove the category associated with a userbox. Ever. --Dschor 22:19, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by User:Eightball

In an edit summary just now on the project page (attached to this edit that changed what was lined out around NPOV as an objection, Eightball said "Many say that Fair Use extends to userpages, but NPOV does not; this is contradicting. Either they both do, or neither do."

  • My response: In my view these are different things. Fair use is legalistic. ALL publications, websites, etc, at least those in the US, have to abide by Fair use, or may get sued. It applies to ALL content, and specifically, it applies at WP in articlespace, templatespace, categoryspace, userspace, you-name-itspace. (and yes I possibly run afoul of Raul's rule about who knows copy law and who doesn't). NPOV is a policy of Wikipedia. It applies where it is chosen to apply. It's an unshakable policy, with respect to articles. Jimbo has said it is not negotiable. However he did NOT say it applies to userspace, and common convention here, as this newb sees it, is that it is OK for users to say they have a point of view. That's getting to the crux of the problem. Is it or isn't it OK? I think it is, I think policy and precedent here say it is too... see WP:UP. (as an aside, it may be under this interpretation that templatespace can't have POV, so all boxes that did assert POV would have to live in userspace and not templatespace)++Lar: t/c 04:48, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd like to note that NPOV does not apply to talk pages the same way it does to articles, either. As far as I can tell, users are free to make their personal POVs clear on talk page discussions when they are relevant to editing of the article. In fact, I don't see how we could have productive discussion without this. Here are some examples of edits I've made to talk pages expressing my POV: "I really don't think this section is going to work out"; "If people were to come forth with examples of the term "heteroflexible" being specifically used in the news media and so on, I think that would be grounds for re-opening the debate on this topic"; "The assumption here that any criticism of Christianity must be based on false premises seemed offbase and not at all NPOV to me"; "I also believe that practitioners of my own religion, Hellenic polytheism, should be willing to walk hand in hand with Wiccans, but I would not add information on Hellenic polytheism to this article because it is not relevant." Thus, NPOV, as it is being interpreted here, already does not apply to portions of Wikipedia. - AdelaMae (talk - contribs) 05:09, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Excellent example. Arguably trying to speak NPOV-ishly in that context would be impossible and worse, useless to making progress. Another place where POV comes up is in (x)fD... if only to disclose one's leanings and perhaps establish credibility on the topic of notability, although that's controversial.++Lar: t/c 05:23, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • My counter-response: First off, Fair Use is considered a guideline on Wikipedia. I'm not refering to the legal equivalent, I'm refering to Wikipedia's interpretation of it, and the way it is applied. I am not trying to interpret the policies and guidelines any differently than they already have been. My _only_ point is that the proponents of userboxes are choosing where to apply certain policies and guidelines. It seems to me that if I did the same I could "choose" to ignore half the policies of WP; if enough did this, it would destroy the system. The policies are in place for a reason. Editors are creating userboxes with copyrighted images, saying Fair Use extends to userboxes, while they also violate NPOV, which they say doesn't extend to user pages (Fair Use, in my, explicitly excludes user pages, while the wording of NPOV seems more ambiguous). You can't be allowed to pick and choose your guidelines. Eightball 06:03, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • You won't see me supporting that stance. I think all fair use images need to be removed from userboxes, forthwith, and do not see fair use as a valid defence for inclusion copyvio images in boxes (as I have said already, rather emphatically). But they ARE being removed. the Userbox project is cranking through all the boxes and fixing them. My point is that violating Fair Use can get WP sued if someone pushed the matter. Violating NPOV is not likely to get WP sued. Hence they are different. But to your point of picking and choosing, I agree, there should not be picking and choosing. That's not the same as deciding which policies apply to what by applying principles though. ++Lar: t/c 07:31, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bit of a refactor

I tried a bit of a refactor here: Policies relevant to the userbox debate to try to capture that some people might think these policies are relevant, because there was a lot of back and forth and maybe this is inclusionary enough to be good? ++Lar: t/c 05:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Basically a user conduct issue

From my perspective, the actual problem seen at least by Tony Sidaway is that userboxes are being used to rally POV crusades (especially regarding deletion). I would prefer a policy to deter this behavior directly, whether carried out through userboxes or not, by blocking/banning the users engaging in it, rather than deleting the userboxes themselves, which 95% of users seem able to employ harmlessly. Deleting the userboxes is at best a stopgap, as users who are operating with the intent of deliberatly subverting neutrality will surely find another way to do so. Christopher Parham (talk) 06:59, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's a stopgap. But the least we can do is to deny the enemy of consensus and neutrality the free use of the most powerful tools at our disposal. If I want to tell the world I'm a Bigendian I'll do so, but it would be wrong for me to add a "Bigendian Wikipedians" category to my userpage enabling all of us Bigendians t operate as a bloc. This is what userboxes do. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 07:04, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If userboxes did not add to categories would that be as good (or almost as good) of a stopgap as deleting them altogether? I suspect that the dedicated team of editors at the Userbox project, if that were the consensus, would have that fixed in nothing flat. The speed at which they are fixing the fair use issue, and at which they are fixing the multilevel template substitution issue, is nothing short of remarkable (as well as amazingly commendable). PS, Tony, I for one am glad you are here and talking about this. Very glad. Thanks. ++Lar: t/c 07:24, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that as a stopgap it is harmful to other concerns as well, both in that it pointlessly alienates the many people who manage to use these userboxes harmlessly, and in that it deprives us of the utility gained by having people organized into these categories when they are employed productively. I don't see any reason to undertake this solution to the problem, which has these obvious flaws, when we could attack the problem directly without causing collateral damage. Christopher Parham (talk) 07:22, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
WikiProjects do EXACTLY the same in some cases. - But they're not banned or with possible policy to stop users "grouping" together: This happens anyway in the long run:
For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Islam:The Muslim Guild (and it's splinter WikiProjects for Shia and Sunni) looks like it's the Islam equivalent of the Catholic WikiProject Sidaway doesn't like so much (there's already a Wikipedia:WikiProject Islam for people that don't necessarily follow the religion)
Stuff like this will always happen on Wikipedia, what you are trying to do is stop people grouping together by view by making it harder to find people: This is silly, it happens anyway on Wikipedia --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 07:39, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You don't have to be a Muslim to be a member of Wikiproject Islam, any more than you have to be a resident of Indiana to be a member of Wikiproject Indiana. Wikiproject membership is an indication of interest, not of belief. That's the difference between the two. I support userboxes to indicate Wikiproject membership (and you will note that I have three such userboxes on my user page). Kelly Martin (talk) 16:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Assume Good Faith - TCorp 00:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree its not userboxes which is the problem, also its not users grouping themselves together. What is the problem is when users group together in an attempt to go against the core NPOV policy, that is when userboxes are used as find users to swing a vote for a particular POV. Even if userboxes were removed users would still find ways to group together and these could happen outside the sphere of wikipedia where there is less chance of regulation. What is really needed is a Wikipedia:Policy on cordinated actions by factions or something like that.

Userboxes do actually offer a means of identifying factions. If you suspect a cordinated action then you could actually prove that it is such though looking at their userboxes. Better to keep things in the open than create secret societies.

Luckly we have a strong consensus policy, to prevent a vote for delection all which is needed is one post pointing out the coordinated action of other posters and the vote should fail. Ultimately coordinated actions against NPOV could result in users being banned. --Pfafrich 09:21, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That policy will simply result in an organization by cells. No one would say talking to two other people on their User:Talk page was "coordination", yet if those two talk to two more, and so on, you've got a regular get-out-the-vote drive. Beware of the law of unintended consequences. Endomion 20:11, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

refactor

( Moved MSK's "counterargument" to talk page ++Lar: t/c 07:20, 4 January 2006 (UTC) )[reply]

Tony added this:

    • Neutrality and Consensus - userboxes can easily be used by POV pushers to enable them to contact a large number of like-minded people so as to destroy the effectiveness of our neutrality policy by subverting normal consensus-based decision-making. Case in point: 9 out of 11 keep voters in the Catholic Alliance deletion debate did so after being contacted by the page's creator who found them through a userbox declaring them to be Catholics and placing them into a category that he was able to scan at the press of a button. (this has to do with usage)

MSK replied:

      • Counter-argument: People will always find other Wikipedians with similar beliefs or interests and form groups of friends in their time on Wikipedia anyway, this only speeds the process and gives less of an advantage to newer users who haven't been around long enough to develop a network of Wiki-friends. Also categories help find other users knowledgeable or interested about the same subjects to help improve articles that might otherwise be neglected. It's not so different from a WikiProject or from users in fact stating their interests on their user page without using a "user box" for it as has been going on for a long time, or user categories without matching userboxes such as those in Category:Wikipedians.

I suggest refactoring it into a point in one of the pro/cons as it's not a policy point per se. The points are points, they should be countered in the pro/con section. IMHO. ++Lar: t/c 07:20, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, done now - hope that's better --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 07:35, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The example about '9 of 11 keep voters' is fallacious, anyway. If you want to demonstrate a POV bias, what matters is not the percentage of voters that voted Keep because they were contacted, but what the overall vote of those contacted was. this page mentions that over 40 people were contacted. So 9 of them voted keep — what did the rest do? squell 21:04, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Community

One thing user boxes let us do is build communities. Communuity building yields two major kinds of benefits. One is that people interested in the same things, or sharing knowledge on the same subjects, can collaborate better as a community. Experts on, say, geology, can coordinate their efforts, distribute the load, and check each other's work. Such a community can even be a resource to outsiders -- to continue my example, if someone else needs to check a geological fact, they can go to the geology community. Most or all of the WikiProjects are fall into this category. The other benefit from community building is less tangible. By making Wikipedia a place people feel like they belong, where they want to come to, we increase the overall quality and quantity of contribution. These are all Good Things, and reasons why User Boxes can be Good Things.

However, as a counter point to all that, it should be noted that putting people into groups does not always build community; indeed, it can do the opposite. Grouping people can divide people. Any time you create a group that is "in", everyone else becomes "out". This is an ancient human behavioral pattern. Being a member of a group that others are not a member of can be powerful and addictive in all the wrong ways.

So, I think one key thing to look at here is: Does the group created by a user box bring people together, or push them apart?

Given that criteria, I realize now that perhaps some of the user boxes on my own user page are, perhaps, not as nice as they should be. Rather then saying "I contribute with Foo", perhaps it would be better if I just said "I know a lot about Foo".

--DragonHawk 07:42, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please be careful in refactoring

MSK while you refactored helpfully, I think this point got lost from the policy points

    • Neutrality and Consensus - userboxes can easily be used by POV pushers to enable them to contact a large number of like-minded people so as to destroy the effectiveness of our neutrality policy by subverting normal consensus-based decision-making. Case in point: 9 out of 11 keep voters in the Catholic Alliance deletion debate did so after being contacted by the page's creator who found them through a userbox declaring them to be Catholics and placing them into a category that he was able to scan at the press of a button. (this has to do with usage)

So I put it back. It's a valid policy concern whether you agree with it or not, and we must be careful not to lose text accidentally. IMHO. ++Lar: t/c 07:45, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't mean to delete it, sorry
I was just about to add it back then came back after realising you had already hah. Didn't read properly }. Ok, I tried to make it a bit more NPOV: It must be noted that most of the "applicable policy" bit is things from the "concerns about not regulating userboxes" bit. --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 07:57, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ya, it does (read like a personal view) at that, even after you AGFed it... See if Tony's willing to move it out of the policies list and into the appropriate pros/cons section would be my suggestion. (the pro/cons sections still don't quite seem to have the right titles either but they're clearer than they were, the reason there are two sections are to separate userboxes from stating preferences/viewpoints, it's possible there are things about a box that is completely preference statement free that are good or bad) ++Lar: t/c 07:59, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that if you look at the case objectively, userboxes on political stances have any detrimental effect. It's mentioned above that Catholic users had been called in and therefore artificially made it seem as if the article's Catholic POV was correct. However, it seems that these are currently userboxes on a broad range of stances, and each of them has significant numbers of users. So, if the dispute was, say, between Catholics and Atheists, and a single Catholic user called in others found via userboxes, what prevents the Atheists from doing the same, for example? Additionally, there is a big cost to this in terms of freedom of expression. Wikipedian user pages should not be censored against this type of material, particularly since people have been allowed to write personal points of view on their user pages since Wikipedia began in 2001. For that reason, I believe that advocacy through userboxes is not a bad thing at all; in fact, it can help make the Wikipedia community much more vibrant. Not to mention the many social reasons why userboxes are important - they enable Wikipedia users to know each other better and, more importantly, they enable users to check each other for NPOV problems. For example, if I'm having a dispute or discussion about an article with another user, and that user has userboxes which indicate political and religious POV, I know where that user's stance is coming from, and I can therefore argue with him in a much more efficient way, thus resolving the dispute much faster. Understanding and knowing other users during a dispute is, in my opinion, the best tool to lead to efficient resolution, without descending into alienation and mutual revert wars and insults. Ronline ✉ 11:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Vote stacking as an argument

(in response to Ronline... but started a subsection to make editing easier)

If people are vote stacking I don't think the counter argument is to encourage opposing groups both to stack, as Ronline seems to be advocating (sorry if I mis read but that's my take). WP:NPOV doesn't mean ( POV vs. Opposing POV ) duke it out to see who can win, it means NPOV. NEUTRAL, not paired opposing.... That said I think there is an analogy with gun control here, those advocating userbox prohibition may not like this analogy, sorry. I oppose gun control for the reason that I don't think it works, and because it's going after the tool, not the tool user. Userboxes don't cause vote stacking. Users do. Getting rid of userboxes won't stop votestacking. It may make it marginally harder but it won't stop it. If we want to totally stop vote stacking without going after the people doing it, we have to ban every tool that can be used to do it. No email links, no categories, no searchable text on user pages, no posting what your IM handle is on your user page, etc etc. I think the right thing to do is to maybe make it a little harder to stack (mild: disallow automatic categorisation, stronger: require subst for all boxes so that even what links here can't find usages), not to ban expression of POV on user pages. If user boxes are banned completely I am going to still list my affiliations and beliefs on my page, by hand I guess, until and unless WP:UP says it's against policy to do so. ++Lar: t/c 23:07, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • The theory is that Wikipedia is more of a sociocracy than a democracy. The problem is that we have situations in which we permit majority-rule voting. That is, we're having votes where we should be having discussion to reach consensus. That actually violates NPOV, as we're suppressing minority opinion rather than accurately representing it. The "problem" with userbox/categories is that they enhance this problem. Userboxes/categories also enhance our ability to locate consensus on issues. Fix the problem, not the symptom. —Daelin @ 2024–09–29 23:31
    • One of the "problems", or rather contradictions, on this site, is that although there is the "consensus" poliicy, people are being asked to either "keep" or "delete" an article, template, etc. That sure sounds like VOTING to me. --CJ Marsicano 17:02, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Ya, it does, doesn't it? That wording choice confuses me too, except there are really no better shorthands available. What you are really doing when you say keep is expressing your preference, your opinion. For your keep/delete to carry much weight with the closing admin when he or she evaluates consensus, though, you should try to either introduce new points, or at least reference the logical support points made previously (one way is to refer to the editor that made them by name). Keep posts along the lines of "OMFG don't delete, are you crazy!!!11!!1!!!" tend to carry a lot less weight than ones that refute the reasons the editor proposing the delete gave, with calm, logical, reasoned statements, or even better, verifiable facts. (and vice versa when advocating delete) This is a difficult concept to grok, and not one that I am sure I've completely grokked yet myself. But it's an important one to keep in mind. IMHO.++Lar: t/c 03:16, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • It's a nice theory, and there are a few admins who really do discount editors who give bad opinions in AfDs. The trouble is that most admins are afraid to discount the opinions of editors in good standing. --- Charles Stewart 04:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
          • Um, remember, I'm a newbie. (see my contributions: click on the c in my siggy, or run the edit counter on me, not even 1000 edits yet!!! ...). I'm referring to what NEWBIES need to do to make their opinions carry more weight. They need to show their work, so to speak. I'm actually fairly OK with giving seasoned editors more credence (see the webcomics RfAr, where I strongly argue for automatically giving experts a bit more credence until they blow it. That wasn't a very popular viewpoint.) So maybe you're saying that closing admins do value old hands more and let them get away with "delete, nn fancruft" instead of a more reasoned explanation or verifiable points? ++Lar: t/c

Some concrete examples of belief and conviction-based userboxes being abused

I've mentioned how I think that belief and conviction-based userboxes will be abused and I've given one good example where 9 out of 11 keep voters on an article up for deletion voted after their talk page was spammed.

Perhaps people are saying this was a one-off, a fluke, just one user who overstepped that mark. Not a bit of it. Only the previous week, the following two incidents took place and again involved (to some greater of lesser extent) someone looking in a user category planted on a page by a user box and then spamming the talk pages.

Of course we don't know how many times someone has abused these categories in a savvy way, contacting people by email instead.

I'm sorry that my examples are all based around similar issues. It's not that I have a thing about Catholics (I was raised as a Catholic myself), but that (including the example that I gave before) these are the three examples that come most readily to hand. I remembered the Pitchka one from last month, and found the Chooserrr one while looking for it. I don't even strongly disagree with the opinions expressed in the talk page spam, but I do think that this manner of approach severely compromises our policies on consensus and neutrality. s

--Tony Sidaway|Talk 08:30, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProjects do exactly the same: grouping Wikipedians together by interest, political or religious affiliation, and also this is just a more conspicuous way of things that already go on without userboxes: People naturally form groups of friends and some do tend to pick up this "pack reverting" technique, categories or no --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 08:43, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Two counterpoints to your response:

  • Wikiprojects are bound by the neutrality policy and may not have closed membership.
  • Wikipedia Categories certainly don't have closed membership either, though.
  • People may not be allowed to blatantly push POV on WikiProjects, but they can still link to relevant articles with the intentions that those people with that particular POV will revert war because of the very fact they're in a particular Project: In fact Categories are much more inconvenient to gather large amount of editors to sway votes etc because there is no centralised message board, each person must be contacted individually. --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 09:14, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Putting a message on a WikiProject page is not the same as spamming a score or more of user talk pages.
It has the same effect though, not taking into account the actual disruptiveness of spam. --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 09:14, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the issue here is very different. Because people have general freedom of expression on user pages, it is important to ensure that this doesnn't leak into the category space and enable pushers of one point of view or another. That is what the belief-based userboxes do (I've no great objection to the vast majority of userboxes). --Tony Sidaway|Talk 08:56, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe, but the problem is it can sometimes be helpful for good faith actions like trying to find people with similar interests to contribute with though --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 09:16, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In this case it seems the userboxes were used to preserve NPOV. By calling for deletion maybe it was the pro-choice who were trying to push their POV? (Don't know what I'm on about!) --Pfafrich 09:30, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In response to Mistress Selina Kyle's point, I completely agree. I have a Template:user advogato userbox on my own page that I constructed myself. It identifies me as an apprentice member of the Advogato community, which describes itself as "a community resource for free software developers." However this is not quite the same as a box identifying me as a Bigendian in politics, an Omnian in religion, and that I believe in the rights of fleebles to graze unfettered on the hills. These latter are the kinds of userbox that could lead to abuse (and have already done so). --Tony Sidaway|Talk 10:03, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is very important to maintain these userboxes, because it does lead to a more balanced POV for Wikipedia overall. In fact, people will really only "canvas" others of a similar point of view to come when the opposite point of view has more power in a dispute. For example, if a certain article is given, say, a religious slant, Atheist Wikipedians will be able to organise themselves much better to ensure that the article goes back to being NPOV. Ronline ✉ 11:30, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia is more akin to a sociocracy than a democracy; we want power of logic to be the most important, not power in numbers. The ability to canvas like-minded users is only good if those users add additional logical arguments to the disucssion, and is not useful if they simply vote "me too". Also, allowing votes to swing one way simply because there are more members on that side will tend to promote more systemic bias, not less. --Interiot 14:56, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's an interesting assumption that such unscrupulous methods would only ever be used to redress "balance", but the underlying assumption that people have any business at all editing Wikipedia from a pro- or anti- atheist/circumcusionist/abortionist/bigendian/antidisestablishmentarian point of view is fundamentally wrong. Every single edit by every single editor must be written from a neutral stance and in the interests of Wikipedia. Organising raids on articles by one side or the other would be the death of neutrality and an end to consensus. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:05, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Your lip-service to consensus seems not really compatible with the way you've behaved in this discussion till now. I quote you from your talk page: 'what the community thinks is not important.' Larix 13:12, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You misquote me slightly. "It's an encyclopedia, and those buttons threaten its identity. It doesn't matter what the community thinks, we must act in the interests of the encyclopedia at all times." There is no consensus on whether these items are fit for Wikipedia--far from it. I put the interests of the encyclopedia before those of the community, every single time, as any good wikipedian is required to. If there exists a consensus to permit destructive actions, I will still not feel obliged to permit Wikipedia to be destroyed by its community. I stand by those words and I expect you and every other Wikpedian to do the same. Otherwise this really is just another Livejournal. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:31, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You are defending your personal interpretation of what's in the interest of Wikipedia (apparently considering yourself far above the community) and do that without any concern for consensus, thereby carelessly disturbing hundreds of userpages. Actions like these are far more dangerous then a single userbox. Besides, you keep arguing they all have categories attached but you very well know most of them don't. Larix 13:39, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Tony, I think the benefit of the community is for the benefit of Wikipedia. It's time we realise that the more we mistreat the community and expect them to work like robots "for the good of the encyclopedia" without any other form of reward, the less this project will work. This reminds me very much of Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu - "every good Romanian must always put the interests of the Party before his or her own interests". It simply doesn't work that way. This encyclopedia's direction is inspired very much by what the community thinks, since they're the ones writing it. Ronline ✉ 00:17, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not getting the difference between having the Advogato userbox on your userpage and having userboxes reflecting your political and religious beliefs. Neither is relevant to writing Wikipedia; both can help people with similar interests find you. For that matter (as I mentioned above) how are your Babel boxes relevant to writing Wikipedia? --Angr (tɔk) 13:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Babel boxes identify me as a native speaker of one European language, a fairly skilled speaker of another, and a basic understanding of a third. Someone wanting a rough translation of a foreign language article may look for people with such skills, and I have gone to people with such skills myself in the past when I needed them. Advogato is a community of free software specialists, people who produce most of the software, from PHP, Mysql, Mediawiki, Apache and Squid, that powers Wikipedia. Being part of that community says something about my skills and experience in such matter (though not nearly enough, since I've been in the business for 30 years). Think of it as a Project Babel for software developers. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 13:36, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so Advogato is directly related to WP. But as for the Babelboxes being used to find someone with language skills: someone looking for information about a religion or a political stance can use religious and political userboxes to find someone knowledgeable in those areas. I don't see any harm in the userboxes, but if the consensus is to get rid of non-Wikipedia-relevant ones, won't the Babel boxes have to go too? --Angr (tɔk) 13:46, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Surely we agree that it is the linked categories that are the problem, not the userboxes themselves. Therefore, removing automatic categorisation from any userbox template would resolve this issue. I really hate to bring this up, but policy proposal #4 set out this very point - categorisation should only be allowed for certain, specified areas (see proposal. Deano (Talk) 13:49, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The Babel boxes also have linked categories. Why should a person be allowed to be in Category:User en but not Category:Religious socialist Wikipedians? --Angr (tɔk) 14:16, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
One is POV, the other is not. POV categories should not be bundled with userbox templates. That is crucially important. The others are useful to Wikipedia. Deano (Talk) 14:56, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Language boxes are not necessarily POV, but they certainly can be. If you have a user from Northern Ireland who identifies as a speaker of either Irish or Ulster Scots, that's going to be a pretty good guide to their politics the majority of the time. --Angr (tɔk) 15:26, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
We saw a demonstration already (albeit hypothetical) of a language box possibly enabling POV-push-rallying. I would say that computer languages, hypothetically, could be the same thing. If someone starts pushing the POV (in the COBOL article) that COBOL rocks and Java sucks rocks, someone else could well go around finding all the people with Java boxes and rally them to fight back. Ditto Advogado... I work for a company that gets 250,000 USD or more for some of its licenses... couldn't Avogado advocates possibly engage in POV pushing against my employer (hypothetically). The point here is that any way to find users that claim something about themselves is possibly a way to enable POV-push-rallying. I am willing to see restrictions on boxes that incite hate speech but not on boxes in general. WP is not a free speech zone but if you are going to say Avogado is an OK affiliation but FSMism is not an OK affiliation to advertise, I'll fall back on the what the US supreme court said, the line ought to be where it's hate speech we are talking about. Else your unfree speech maybe is better than mine? Again, I think this is trying to address the tool, not the tool user, and addressing the tool this way fails to WP:AGF. IMHO. ++Lar: t/c 23:17, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • First, the number of votes doesn't matter in AFD so much as the content of the vote. Second, if you suspect bias, just click on their signature and check for a userbox! --Mareino 15:29, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Very true, in theory anyways. Consensus is not based on the number of votes. If 100 people vote one way on an issue without justifying their votes, and 10 vote against them with reasonable, sound and neutral arguments, the issue should be resolved in the 10's favor. See Wikipedia:Voting. ~MDD4696 20:55, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think we're forgetting about something. First of all, I think we all agree that Wikipedians who want to muster the vote to support their POV can and do do this with userbox categories, and can and do do this with mechanisms other than user boxen and their respective category. But, likewise, they can be used to help the project: I see on my user talk page right now a solicitation to help get an article up to FA status because I was in Category:Atheist Wikipedians (I don't display the userbox, but the category is attached to a userbox). We need to consider both the good and the bad on this one. Lord Bob 16:50, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think that most important issue against userboxes is that POV-pushing. However we should not ban the tool, but rather ban the action. POV-pushers will simply find another tool. And userbox categories can be used to great effect to enforce a ban on POV-pushing. It will be much harder to ferret out bands of POV pushers without userboxes.--Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 19:16, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
From what I gather, Birgitte, you're proposing that we ban, say, liberal users who have a liberal userbox to vote on the deletion/keeping of liberal-related articles. That is, that the action of informing like-minded Wikipedians in a dispute should be banned, rather than the userboxes themselves. However, do you realise that that turns Wikipedia into a police state? Seriously, it is a significant breach to user liberties to say "you're not allowed to tell like-minded people of a vote going on". From the point we do that, we'll have the equivalent of a thought police monitoring Wikipedian users. That's simply unacceptable. Wikipedia grew on this notion of freedom, both freedom to use, to edit and freedom in general. Wikipedia has and is at the moment a free community and a free encyclopedia, and this has enabled it to grow substantially. The moment you try to impose bans on certain activities, the more disgruntled the community will be and the more the project will suffer. Not to mention that there will be a growing dislike between admins and other users, leading to the creation of a "ruling class" in a system that is by definition quite absent of hierarchy. And, the more restrictions you impose on the community, the more it will not be able to meet the goal of building an encyclopedia but will be forced to learn all the new rules, consider whether the action they are doing is "legal" and then argue with admins if they believe they were treated incorrectly. It all amounts to a huge level of bureaucracy. Ronline ✉ 06:08, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
From what I gather, Birgitte, you're proposing that we ban, say, liberal users who have a liberal userbox to vote on the deletion/keeping of liberal-related articles.'That is not what I mean. I think we should ban vote campaigning. Although there is no problem with people leaving a message like Be aware Example has been nominated for deletion. It is really important that all the disscusion about why an article should be deleted or kept stay on the same page. And also that the proccess is transparent. Maybe it is unenforcable. Maybe it would be enough that when something seems fishy someone would be able to track down through userboxes what prompted the POV pushing and copy that disscussion back to the relavent site. Userboxes will not make an editor a POV pusher, but it can help those who respect nuetrality find the POV pushing disscusions and join in to inform them why it is a problem and maybe educate them or shame them into reforming--Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 20:50, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just read what I wrote again perhaps ban is the wrong as I don't imagine blocking people for this is a good idea. But to have guideline against vote campaigning is more what I mean. I don't see why this should make any problems between admins and non-admins if there is no banning. In fact just because someone has a liberal user box doesn't mean they are a POV pusher but having one may attract POV pushers to them and then they educate such people about the importance of nuetrality and if they realize the POV pushers doesn't care they can keep an eye on them. I believe most editors agree with and support NPOV and it is probaly easier to convince like-minded POV pushers to reform than opposing POV pushers. In general userboxes can be a tool to rid us POV problems and getting rid of them will not prevent POV gangs from forming.--Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 21:06, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest copyright images do not qualify as fair use when used in user boxes, and so there should be a policy against the use of such images in this way. Steve block talk 13:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Correct, they don't. Rob Church Talk 15:21, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What about templates? Someone recently removed Image:CompassRose.gif from the Anglican portion of {{user religion}}, on the grounds that it's a "non-free" image, but no one seems to mind it being on {{Anglicanism}} and {{Anglican Churches}}. (Or have I just violated WP:BEANS?) --Angr (tɔk) 15:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I removed some images from User templates yesterday. Please note that User page content may not include "fair use" images. Templates made for user pages are subject to this Wikipedia policy. Templates that are made for Wikipedia encyclopedic content may contain fair use images. TCorp 16:50, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Update. my bad. you can't use fair use images in ANY tamplate. TCorp 16:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest the opposite of what Mr. Block suggests. Fair use includes social commentary and satire/parody, either or both of which userboxes practice, depending on the userbox in question. To suggest that they aren't would definitely be a violation of WP:BEANS. --CJ Marsicano 22:58, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe so, but I think most would not agree with that analysis. Further, if it came down to it I'd rather have boxes with only PD/GFDL images than no boxes, that is, I'd give up fair use images gladly to keep the boxes themselves. ++Lar: t/c 00:16, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't rely think a policy is needed

Or at least not a seperate policy. What is allowed on a userpage should not be banned from userboxes (except for things like WP:AMT that apply to all templates for technical reasons) and conversely what is allowed in a userbox should not be something that would not be allowed on a userpages. Hence the logical thing to do is not to create a seperate policy just for userboxes, but to add a section on templates on userpages in general to WP:UP and promote it to policy if need be. WP:UP already says that if the comunity ask you to take down something you have on your userpage you should comply, so it's not like it is a complete free for all zone. WP:FU, WP:NPA, WP:NOT and WP:CIVIL all still apply and should be enforced regardles of wether the offending content is in a userbox or not. I would encourage the userbox project to try and make some checks on the creation of new templates though. Templates that only interest one or two people should be made by substring the userbox template rather than creating yet another template page to do the job. "One shot" templates should as aways be substed and deleted, or at least "userified".

On a slightly related issue I think Wikipedia:User categorisation and Wikipedia:Wikiproject userboxes should be merged or at least cooperate closesly to "police" the creation of new categories and templates for userpages. Much like Wikipedia:Wikiproject stub sorting works for stub templates and categories today. People who detest that kind of beurocracy could still be free to create and subst one shot boxes based on the "meta" userbox template, but creation of new categories and template pages should idealy go though some kind of aproval at the relevant project(s) first. --Sherool (talk) 15:28, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fortunately Wikipedia:Fair use has that covered with "Fair use images ... should never be used on templates (including stub templates and navigation boxes) or on user pages." (that clause was there at least as far back as Nov 2005) Templates are different from user pages, because 1) a violation of fair use in a template gets multiplied as it's placed on many different pages, and 2) as WP:FAIR indicates, use in templates may be by definition moving into a gray area of fair use law or an outright violation of fair use law. --Interiot 15:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the last thing we need to create more policies and more restrictions; all I think we should do is clarify the current policies and decide how far they apply to userpage spaces. Eightball 19:24, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Policy problem

Proponents of this policy fear that userboxes will lead to Wikipedians with similar POVs networking and uniting for common agendas.

My primary problem with this argument is its verifiability.

Put it this way. Imagine things had happened the other way around. Imagine we had never had userboxes and were now debating whether they should be permitted for the first time. We would have to deal with speculative questions like this. If we have userboxes, will our NPOV and encyclopaedic nature be compromised?

But we have had userboxes for some time. We don't need to speculate; we need only look around. We have userboxes. Are our values compromised? They've been around for a while. Do we see rampant partisanship and POV? I submit that we do not.

Userboxes are more "Wiki" than "Pedia", to be sure. What I mean is that they do not serve our encyclopaedic function-this is perfectly true. However, I believe that they serve a community building purpose--a no less valid part of the Wikipedian experience. I have tonnes of userboxes on my page. They are an integral part of my userpage. Do I seek out others with similar views? Absolutely. Just yesterday, I was touched to see how much I have in common with (and how much I differ from) User:Canadianism. But does this mean that I am going to start forming caucuses of Anglican/autistic/pacifist/NDP/pro-life/queer users? I plead that I can make my views public without allowing them to seep inappropriately into the article namespace.

That is my tuppence worth. If I have made leaps, assumptions, or false conclusions then by all means bring them to my attention. Carolynparrishfan 17:21, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This "Networking" being blamed on userboxes is somewhat lame to say the least. There's a wikipedia NPOV policy already in place for encyclopedic content. User pages need not be NPOV. And even if someone wanted to find someone else with the same beliefs, or say administrative privileges, to gang up on for example the evolution page, or gang up on pages like these, there's IRC and a whole list of other resources that are far more effective than userboxes one could use. TCorp 20:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I think the IRC, email, and off-Wikipedia-forum networking is a FAR greater threat than userboxes, categories, and on-Wikipedia networking could ever be. At least on-Wikipedia methods are all transparent. I've been disturbed by the role that various IRC channels seem to have played in coordinating actions in the recent wheel wars and related RfC's. CarbonCopy (talk) 22:35, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have to agree as well. It's shocking that the administrators present during the conversations in IRC don't respond to these coordinating actions. Gflores Talk 22:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I third this. The IRC is a useful tool at times, granted. However, due to the policy that publicly posting quotes from the chat is a bannable offense, Wikipedians cannot be held accountable for what they say in the channel, and any "coordinating actions" aren't readily apparant on Wikipedia. I understand some of the reasoning behind that rule, but I also cannot see such a lack of acountability being anything but problematic in an environment of massive collobaration. --Blu Aardvark | (talk) | (contribs) 23:00, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Fourthed. There's a policy on not quoting IRC?? Talk about your secret cabals... no, I don't believe in them here necessarily, being accused of being in several cabals in real life, but the appearance of impropriety is troublesome, to say the least. IRC/chat communications are anti-wiki, and the moreso if they are unrecordable/opaque. -- nae'blis (talk) 16:13, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If the IRC channel really is a secret cabal, it must be the most wiki-esque secret cabal in the world, since anybody can log onto it. Don't get me wrong, I think the no-IRC quotes policy is stupid, but I think you're attaching a significance and dark quality to the channel that does not exist. And God only knows why we're talking about this here... Lord Bob 16:59, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There was definitely organizing in favor of the contested deletions and in support of certain individuals occuring on IRC during the conflict - and that is just on the official channel. Others exist. Ironically, one of the reasons given justifying emergency deletion of userboxes and cited as excuses for extrajudicial blocks during the conflict was the "improper" use of userboxes to recuit participants into the conflict. CarbonCopy (talk) 21:11, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Everyone who comes to Wikipedia.org has all of the tools at their disposal to edit the encyclopedia, take part in policy discussions, etc. A browser and (maybe) JavaScript) are the only requirements. IRC is an often-arcane, unreliable, confusing means of communication for non-techies. Also, IRC happens in real-time, without the chance to view it later (even in the history) as happens here and to a lesser extent on the mailing list. That's the difference, I think, and why I thought it was worth mentioning (since a large part of this discussion centers around the idea of Wikipedian categories being used for ballot stuffing). Plus I was just purely surprised to find out such a policy existed - buried on meta, apparently. The fact that you can be banned from #wikipedia for publishing private logs doesn't help, IMO. Sometimes the appearance of impropriety can be as damaging as the actual improper behavior itself would be, if not moreso. -- nae'blis (talk) 17:46, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Childish but true

Userboxes is plain fun. It is childish but truly human to wear labeled clothes. Still a cop will ask you to remove offensive/illegal terms or pictures showing on your shirt. No more policies needed IMhO. --Harvestman 20:24, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This free speech is regulated. I thought swearing wasn't allowed on userboxes except to a certain extent. I am against Wikiswearing except when it's directed at oneself (such as the "This user speaks Bullshit" userboxes.) Plus, unregulated free speech doesn't nessisarily mean anarchy. -- Hurricane Eric - my dropsonde - archive 22:59, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Since when has this applied to userpages? The only thing i canthink of is Wikipedia:No personal attacks. Circeus 23:36, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Reading the existing policy and guideline stuff, I don't see userpages as being totally excempt from Wikipedia policy. Indeed, WP:UP is a guideline, not policy. Userpages are allowed more latitude, for reasons noted, but they are not a general, personal web space. They exist first and foremost to help the cause of writing an encyclopedia. This is my take, obviously but I think it has objective merit, in that we should make sure that everything we do helps create a better encyclopedia. If something isn't about that goal, it really doesn't belong here. Yes, that means childish behavior does not belong here. Sorry.  :) --DragonHawk 03:15, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I want to clear my point of neutral view. There are three kinds of userboxes, two of them pertaining to our goals.

  • Standard boxes are administered and categorized and allow people to find help and competence amongst others.
  • Personal userboxes that rely on standard manners are fun and contribute to a good community spirit.
  • Personal offending or illegal ones are to be banned. But my motto was : NMPN no more policies needed, because it is clearly stated that we have enough of them. Too much law kills the law. --Harvestman 17:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Resource usage

I agree, it is somewhat of a waste, but there are many things that contribute little to Wikipedia. Look how many pages this has... Wikipedia:We hold these Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense to be self-evident and Wikipedia:List of really, really, really stupid article ideas that you really, really, really should not create. There are many more similar sites. Do they serve a purpose besides humor? Not really. I'd call that a greater resource waster. Gflores Talk 22:21, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would also like to add to this resource discussion that userboxes can attract new users (I am fond of them myself!) who then give more to the community. I joined wikipedia by making a fun userpage, then finding stuff to contribute on, and while I'm still new and haven't given much back yet, I intend to stick around in part because the community seems friendly and fun. Regulating self-expression is likely to cause me to just vanish from the service as a producer, and pretty much push me back into a consumer-only role. In other words, I pretty much feel like the userboxes do serve a productive purpose, in the form of making the users happy and content to stick around. Certainly my downloading dozens of high resolution images as a consumer doesn't compare to my resource consumption with a few small, mostly-text userboxes anyway? ♥ GeekGirlSarah ♥ 23:16, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think having humorous little sideshows to the main attraction that is the encyclopedia is necessary to keep all of the editors sane and actually enjoying their roles here. These pages are good for just a quick little reprieve, a good chuckle or two, and nothing more. There are not all that many of these compared to the massive amounts of actual articles on the site, so I fail to see exactly how these pages matter more than the rest of the site in terms of resource usage, or anything else. They're usually never linked to outside of the Wikipedia namespace, so there's no real bleeding into the project proper. No one except a regular visitor/contributor would ever find these pages, so I don't think they're in the way or anything. Mo0[talk] 02:51, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Userboxes that contribute little (directly) to the encyclopedia is a wasteful use of Wikipedia's computing
I'm just saying... this argument applies to those sites. Wouldn't you say your response can be applied to Userboxes? Userboxes are used by no one except a regular visitor/contributor. Anyway, it looks like it doesn't matter, Nickptar seems to say it hardly doesn't have any effect on resources. Gflores Talk 04:46, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Aye. Even if it did, Wikipedia is about people. It is not about writing an encyclopedia. Wikipedia exists to emancipate those bound to intellectual poverty. Wikipedia exists to further enlighten those who are fortunate enough to already have a (comparatively) substantial education. Those who believe Wikipedia is about Wikipedia contribute to its failure. cookiecaper (talk / contribs) 08:42, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's not how I read Wikipedia. -- Dalbury(Talk) 12:09, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like userboxes

... does that make me a bad person? It seems to me that Wikipedia could use more tools for productive networking; ways to find peers to edit with, to keep up with what they are doing, to share new finds and favorites lists and todo lists with them. And more ways to add interest to pages while keeping them informational. If people want to divulge their personal beliefs, histories, loves, hates, and other biases, more power to them. MediaWiki doesn't currently offer much along the lines of built-in ways to gather or share such information; lashing out at users' efforts to make their own from scratch seems unnecessary and unkind. +sj + 05:51, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, the argument that this is a privileged way to encourage vote-stuffing is a bit rich. It is equally a privileged way of /identifying/ bloc-based vote stuffing. +sj +
You are implying that a person's vote would be discounted if a piece of vote-getting spam is sitting on their user page. Endomion 19:43, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New Redirect

I created a new abbreviation for this policy - WP:UBP --God of War 07:16, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A draft WP:UBP Proposal

As the main page is being used to direct discussion, and I'm a bit of a newbie to the Right Way™ to go about this, I've drafted a user subpage. I think I hit the consensus points, but it's very fairly incomplete. I figure this will provide a focus, and everyone can discuss if they even want a page like this to exist. This'll be a discussion product, while WP:UBP remains an issue synopsis. —Daelin @ 2024–09–29 23:31

I don't think anyone has been using it that I can see. Perhaps you should raise the points here, seek consensus and then edit them into the policy draft? Also I think it may not be a good idea to use the {{CURRENTDAY}} et. al. templates in your signature as they resolve to what time it is right NOW when the page is rendered, not what time you posted. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 03:20, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Concerns about not regulating userboxes

Moved from main page to talk, as it is in dispute -- nae'blis (talk) 19:32, 5 January 2006 (UTC) [reply]
  • Userboxes may be a wasteful use of Wikipedia's computing power, and importantly, a wasteful use of real dollars and pounds (and yen and rupees) that people have contributed.
    • No. Wikipedia's main bottleneck, I believe, is server CPU load, most of which comes from serving up articles to readers, who are, after all, the vast majority of WP users. In fact, I would bet that less than 1% of server resources are used by user pages (not just userboxes). In any case, the actual number of extant userboxes should barely affect CPU load at all, as the only resource required to store them is disk space, which isn't a problem. (True, having extra entries in the database slows down operations a teeny tiny bit... but again here, the entire user space is a drop in the bucket.) ~~ N (t/c) 23:33, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Some potential donors may resent having their own pretty pastel boxes surreptitiously removed. Endomion 02:26, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • Raises hand and while closing wallet.Gateman1997 19:16, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
          • I'm not sure this is a good argument to make. Even if it's true it comes off sounding a bit petty. If this really is an issue, a verifiable study showing a big drop off in donations, or a large number of lost editors might be a lot more effective. That said, if you don't want to donate, for whatever reason, you should feel free not to do so. IMHO.++Lar: t/c 03:22, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A Question from Soltak

I have a question regarding userboxes, one that I don't think has been satisfactorily answered. How are userboxes of any kind helpful or relevant to the writing of an encyclopedia? From something as general as gender to something as specific as which Star Wars bounty hunter one would shoot first, what difference does it make? Soltak | Talk 19:45, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • Because if I think an article on Star Wars needs to be expanded, I could search out Star Wars fans via userboxes and leave them a message requesting a look-see and an editorial contribution. Endomion 19:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Ah, but that is the same manner in which votes can be gathered as well...hence the main problem.--MONGO 19:52, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I have no problem with what you described, Endomion. However, I don't think "User Who Would Shoot Greedo First" is an effective method. I am fully in support of "Users Who Are Star Wars Experts," "Users Experienced in Politics" and the like purely for the purpose of article collaboration and expansion. However, as pointed out above, that's not the only purpose such groupings have been or will be used for.Soltak | Talk 20:24, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A stronger fair use image argument, with a compromise suggestion

OK, I am gleaming from what has been said on the fair use issue that people are afraid that a wholesale use of copyright images on user pages in the manner of a webpage could result. I can see that argument.

So, I would suggest that policy be amended to permit the fair use of copyrighted images in userboxes only. Any other use of copyrighted images on user pages (unless the user actually holds the copyright) should result in the usual procedures requesting that such images be removed. --CJ Marsicano 16:17, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • If I'm not mistaken, this is equally in violation of copyright law, which cannot be changed by an on-Wikipedia decision. It's still not fair use. ~~ N (t/c) 00:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • You are correct that this, too, would constitute a legal violation. In addition to the illegality of CJ's suggestion, it's just a bad idea. "Can't we just allow it in this little area under these strict circumstances?" can very quickly become "What's the problem with allowing it everywhere?" Soltak | Talk 00:46, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • However those images designed and relased by there creators for self-identification, such as the logos used in the "Democrat" and "Republican" userboxes, are prettyl clearly leagal under US law. Use of such logos in userboxes would be a limited and IMO rational policy change, and would not in any way subject us to legal liability, although we should run that past the foundation's legal experts to confirm this. DES (talk) 00:51, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm sympathetic to what I call "community use only" licensing, which allows media to be used in community space (such as user space) but not in article space (except where it can be used without license as fair use). However, media whose licensing permits such use must be clearly marked as such. And you will need to get consensus to allow this, which may be hard (my personal portrait was recently deleted because it was licensed as "{{CommunityUseOnly}}"). Kelly Martin (talk) 04:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • Introducing a new license tag type for that seems a good idea!... but independent of this, no? Until and unless such an license tag were introduced, boxes containing fair use images, in my view, need to be marked for cleanup, and if not cleaned up in short order, marked for deletion. But the key point about that, IMHO, is to work the process, not just delete them outright without first giving folks a chance to correct them. The userbox project team works amazingly fast from what I have seen. ++Lar: t/c 03:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you're really opposed to "silly" userboxes, then either:

  • Nominate Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense for deletion. It would be a WP:POINT violation for me to do this (as I briefly considered doing). But if you actually believe that silly and unencyclopedic material has no place in any namespace, you have no excuse.
  • Provide a reasonable argument for how "silly" userboxes are worse for the encyclopedia than BJAODN.

(Yes, I realize this doesn't really apply to "POV" userboxes. I'm still working on that metaphor.) ~~ N (t/c) 04:24, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Are poll-stackers silly?

I'm pretty indifferent to the whole attack template thing: until userspace attacks are speediable, I don't see why templates that are only used in userspace should be treated any differently. But templates, categories and images that can be used effectively for poll-stacking operations are a different matter: I endorse all uses of WP:IAR to delete these on sight until we have a speedy criterion to cover them. --- Charles Stewart 01:37, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think to gain support from at least myself, if not from a number of editors besides myself, for that view (and for that criteria) you are going to need to positively demonstrate that the mere fact that something COULD be used a certain way implies that it definitely (or highly probably) WILL be used that way. IMHO. Because IRC can be used that way and so can email and so can telephones and so can off wiki discussion groups. ++Lar: t/c 02:09, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What about WP:TfD#Template:User allboxes? It is clearly designed with this purpose in mind and is well suited for it. --- Charles Stewart 02:47, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, yes, I see where you made that assertion in the TfD, but I'm not clear on how you substantiated it, as I believe I pointed out there as well. ++Lar: t/c 04:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what kind of information would constitute substantiation for you. To be honest, I think it is not possible for me to convince you that any use of userboxes could ever justify deletion. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 08:44, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Postscript Wrt to IRC, email, etc, if there were technologies that could be effectively used to subvert poll-syacking operations organised through these channels, I would probably support them. --- Charles Stewart 02:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just ban their use. Seems simple enough to me. You're going after the tool, not the user. Guns don't kill people, and userboxes don't stack votes. ++Lar: t/c 04:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ban email? How? --- Charles Stewart(talk) 08:44, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • And the case is (if possible) stronger than with guns, which may well be the most dangerous tool for their purpose. Here, two other tools are available: the cat (which we could also ban, I suppose) and the vote on any poll on the issue, say at Project Userbox. Shall we delete them too? ;-? Septentrionalis 04:59, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    I propose banning categories and distinctive images as well as templtes when they are well suited for poll-stacking. For various reasons, I don't think polls work well for poll-stackers, mainly because past polling behaviour will not be a good guide to how they react to when it is suggested they particpate in a new poll. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 08:44, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A plea for Sanity

For all of those that say POV and political userboxes are divise and promote factioning of the wikipedia community, I say this. In the last few days, 4 RfCs have been made (2 approved - with Kelly Martin's having to be reconducted because the 275KB of discussion became incivil), 2 RfAr (admin misconduct and wheel waring - both undecided rejected), and 2 series of mass out-of-process deletions. It has shown a much darker side to the community ("The community is not more important than the encyclopedia... Get on with what we're here for, or sod off"), and has forced 2 people to leave (Firebug and Joe Sewell) and has contributed to others, and lead to many leaving the WikiProject. But more than that, it has destroyed all sense of trust and support of those who are empowered. User are making backups of userboxes for fear that admins will delete them. Personal Attacks are rampant and more people are likely to quit if they get dragged down with this userbox things. Deleting people's userboxes is much more harmful to the community than letting them be. People feel they have been censored and that is not what wikipedia is all about. If wikipedia wants to restore a sense of community trust it should allow everyone to have their little box so that no one feels that they are being attacked or censored. Then they can get back to writing the encyclopedia rather than arguing on this message board here.--God of War 06:25, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, thats from my userpage! (well, most of it!) Ian13ID:540053 14:24, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NPA and CIVIL issues

Are there userboxes that are personal attacks on wikipedians currently? WP:NPA is not WP:CIVIL, and both apply within the community. Userboxes are by definition bound by these two policies.

  • Yes. {{User 2006 New Year Day Participate}} used to more-or-less call anti-userbox users Stalinists, and the word "purge" still creates an implication of such.
    • The actual image on the end of this link says 'This user actively participated in rebellion against the Great 2006 New Year's Day Userbox Purge, and would do it again.' Deleting this rather more suggests an absence of sense of humour and proportion than anything else. Sandpiper 20:10, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(Preceding moved out of the proposed policy, since discussion belongs here on the talk page, not in the proposed policy itself. Aumakua 16:01, 7 January 2006 (UTC))[reply]
I disagree that "the word 'purge' still creates an implication of" Stalinist purges. The word 'purge' is used in many applications without "Stalinist" association. For example, this weekend I am running a "shop order purge" where I work. This removes completed shop orders from our manufacturing data system, and updates master files consistent with what those orders accomplished. This is a regular recurring process so as to make sure that only active shop orders are in the production data system. I believe that "shop order purge" language is consistent with APICS standard terminology for Enterprise resource planning. Other people may be able to cite other examples of "purge" that does not imply any "Stalinist" association. What do you call "the removal of deleted and closed records" from a computer system? I believe that any word like "delete" or "wipe" or "purge" or "obliterate" or "remove" that means essentially the same thing, can be abused to be directed against doing it against people, instead of against computer records. User:AlMac|(talk) 22:28, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Be careful with userbox WP:NPA. I was in a WP:DRV to undelete the speedily deleted Template:user userbox purge template. Inline with the discussion to undelete it, A compromise was suggested of removing the image of stalin. So I thought I would be helpful and post a compromise - stalin free - red little user box with the words: "this user survived the great userbox purge of 2006". That is all it said. Instant 24 hour-ban. No warning. No chance for appeal. That's all. Reason given, NPA. So be careful with the boxes. They really seem to make some admins angry.--God of War 05:18, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Userboxes are just visible categories

I would define userboxes as "a way for users to voluntarily classify and categorize themselves in a visibly uniform manner." As such I think that we'd do well to re-use much of the guideline specified at Wikipedia:Categorization. After all, these userboxes are technically just aesthetically pleasing representations of categories or groups of categories. Why are we reinventing the wheel here?

Userboxes should not be too broad or too narrow. It defeats their purpose (either everybody is a member of a particular category or a single person is). If a user wants to create a userbox that he believes will only be used on his userpage, he should not create a userbox template. Then if other people begin to use it themselves, a template can be subsequently created--that's one of the benefits of a wiki!

In addition, I believe that userboxes should use parameters whenever possible. For example, it makes no sense to have seperate userboxes for every time zone. A user could easily specify which timezone he wishes to display by providing an argument to the template.

Specifically--what do userboxes offer that goes beyond a uniform, visible representation of categories that would justify more than a section on Wikipedia:Categorization? Such a section would basically describe how the guidelines for categories applies to userboxes and specify a few additional caveats, such as image use. ~MDD4696 00:40, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

People want to advertise their opinions to others. Userboxes can do that better than categories.--God of War 01:03, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Erm, that's exactly what I'm saying. They aren't any more than (highly) visible categories, so they should be treated much the same as regular categories. Of course, certain rules would be more lax for them (i.e. WP:NPOV) to permit freedom of expression, but others would be just as strict (WP:NPA and WP:FU for example) to prevent offending people or going against previous precedents. ~MDD4696 03:40, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That is true, but I see userboxes as separate from categories. Each can exist without the other. Evaluating one using criteria for the other may not be the most effective way to look at them. I support guidelines that suggest certain types of userboxes should not have associated categories, as a compromise, to address the vote stacking issue. ++Lar: t/c 03:31, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I fail to see how userboxes can exist without categories. It is technically possible to create a userbox template without listing any wiki categories in it, but when a group of users all put the template on their userpages, they become part of a category in the general sense of the term; it is my opinion then that the userbox should be treated as a category, despite its lack of any actual wiki categories. Of course, it would be different if everyone used subst:, but that would go against a userbox as I defined it (it would no longer be uniform amongst all users). ~MDD4696 03:40, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I see the vote stacking issue as a moot point. This is a global problem within Wikipedia, and there are many other methods that users can employ to accomplish this. Perhaps I am taking WP:AGF to the limit here, but I trust that people will do the right thing. If someone gets a group of people with similar interests to vote on an issue, I think that most of the individuals would do the right thing and vote as they would have voted, had they visited the issue without prompting.
Another way to look at it would be to say that you can never really achieve "voting homogeny" on a wiki. It is a rare occurence that we ever get an even distribution of all the users on Wikipedia to vote on an issue. Just take a look at WP:FPC--more often than not, the pictures are voted and commented upon by the same photography enthusiasts week after week. I certainly don't consider this a bad thing. Those users are enthusiastic about the subject, and devote more thought and effort into the commenting and voting than the general userbase would.
I see finding users who are concerned about a particular issue as a valuable tool in improving Wikipedia. There will be abuses, of course, but I don't think it will be any more significant than current abuses of the system. Prohibiting categories from userboxes won't prevent a determined user from contacting a group of users with shared interests and vote stacking. ~MDD4696 03:57, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Lar, I just read your comments under Vote stacking as an argument, and I think I we basically agree. I suppose there will be some cases where the categories should be prohibited, but I think I would prefer a reactive approach rather than a proactive one. ~MDD4696 04:05, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think we're almost on the same page too... I guess I'm just advocating that provision be made for certain boxes not to have (explicit) categories (your point that implicit categories are formed because of image linking backtracing, what links here backtracing, or even search string backtracing if someone subst'ed all their boxes is well taken), because, as you point out, I think (despite preferring to WP:AGF wherever possible, and despite my general dislike for m:instruction creep...) proactively defusing some of the criticism is a good idea. For the alternative is not so hot... ++Lar: t/c 05:23, 8 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why not just subst the damn things?

I'm a moderate user of userboxes, about 40% of which are ones I created myself for my userpage (and thus do not exist except as arguments to a "blank cheque" template). My main concern here is the potential for server overload. This page says that over 250 userboxes were created in the first three days of January. I don't frickin' care what's going on, 500 userboxes a week, every week, is going to overload the servers unnecessarily, especially when transcluded (and often by a minority of users, since I presume most of these are specialty niche ones). I say we should just make substing all but the most critical ones mandatory and solve the damn issue. If people want to factionalise so badly, stick a damn category on your userpage. Johnleemk | Talk 12:25, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't want to see substing mandatory, becuase that, in my viewpoint, would be instruction creep. On the other hand, I think substing of the templates should be encouraged, as it does provide a number of benefits, including reduced server load and protection against template vandalism or deletion. All of the userboxes on my userpage have been substed. --Blu Aardvark | (talk) | (contribs) 22:51, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Please see some of my comments above in Userboxes are just visible categories. I think part of the purpose for userboxes is to visibly categorize users in a uniform way. If people used subst:, and someone changed the template, not everyone's userbox would look the same. ~MDD4696 23:03, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This is a good point, but quite frankly, I don't really see the value in making the userboxes display exactly the same way verus having slight differences. They would still be more-or-less uniform, which to me, is quite sufficient.--Blu Aardvark | (talk) | (contribs) 06:20, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Having read these posts I subst'd mine and I actually like it this way; now my userpage doesn't change if someone vadalises the templates. -- Sneltrekker†My Talk 08:09, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Incitement to religious hatred

In the UK Incitement to racial hatred is illegal and is currently being discussed in the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. From the text of the bill

  • Section 17A
    • Meaning of "religious hatred"
      • In this Part "religious hatred" means hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief.
  • Section 18:
    • (1) a person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if—
      • (a) he intends thereby to stir up racial or religious hatred, or
      • (b) having regard to all the circumstances the words, behaviour or material are (or is) likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are (or it is) likely to stir up racial or religious hatred.

It seems to me that some userboxes are getting close to these, and hence would be illegal to be displayed in the UK. Maybe theres a need for the policy to have something related to Hate speech? --Pfafrich 13:30, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

IANAL, but I believe it wouldn't hurt to have a boilerplate text to users, about users' assumption of risk with regard to any statutes that apply. I pass no judgement on the statutes, but if you want to be a bigot in contravention to the laws of your state, then it's you - not Wikipedia - who should get the summons.
In the meantime, taking a proactive, outside-the-courts approach, I've created the userbox {{User antiracist}} in an effort to be one step ahead of any Wiki Bigots. -- Daniel 16:28, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to point out that though it looks like the two are covered in the same bill, racism and not not agreeing with or even hating religion or a particular religion are not the same at all.
Religion is not built into people: When people follow religion, the majority choose to follow religion (not including those in countries where it is illegal to ignore religious rules or to follow any other religion). No one gets to pick their race, and discrimination to other humans regarding the amount of pigment (melanin) in their skin is a completely ridiculous concept in itself, perpetuated only by the most ignorant of people.
If you are referring to the recent template that got deleted, {{User against scientology}}: The "Church of Scientology" is not considered a religion by UK law or indeed most other government's laws (see the article): In Germany and Belgium for example it is officially considered a totalitarian cult. In France (a very liberal country..) it's officially regarded as a dangerous cult. In Canada it is not recognised as a religion either. America is the exception, not the rule in considering Scientology a "religion", and Wikipedia is not Ameripedia. (and in itself it's widely regarded that Operation Snow White-like activities involving blackmail of government officials went on to achieve tax-exempt status in the US[1] --Mistress Selina Kyle (Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉) 23:48, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't see how having boxes supporting religions would be effected, only ones against, and the community mostly opposes them already on the gruonds of WP:CIVIL and for that matter offence. Ian13ID:540053 22:19, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"Mostly opposes" doesn't amount to a consensus, and (though admittedly I'm not up on all the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia policy) it should require a consensus that a person's actions pose an immediate threat to the community (under one or more of Wikipedia's established rules) in order to take that person's right to speak away from them - especially when they are speaking on their own UserPage where they're perfectly free to express their own opinions in other ways.
And might I add much of the reason why Scientology critics decided to phrase their userbox in such an up front way is based on the Church of Scientology's own record of incivility using dodgy tactics - e.g., SLAPP suits, abuses of copyright, and in the worst cases outright stalking and harassment. These are all actions which run counter to Wikipedia's mission, ideals, and rules. It does far less harm to allow Scientology critics to walk up to the bright line of incivility, than it does for a group with a record of being uncivil to promote itself in an unanswered and irresponsible manner. --Daniel 03:41, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia isn't a place for campaigning. It's an encyclopedia. While it may be appropriate to express one's opinions on a user page so that other users know about your editing biases, use of any part of Wikipedia to promote that point of view is never acceptable. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 04:14, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I find this line of argument persuasive and I think that we should never be critical of anything on Wikipedia. It is more trouble than it is worth. --Daniel 04:50, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Limiting number of userboxes?

Can someone please tell me if there is a limit to the number of userboxes on a page? An admin deleted several edits on my userpage because he said I had too many userboxes. I'm just wondering if there is some official policy on a maximum number of userboxes, and if so, could it please be put onto the relevant policy page? Thanks. --Cyde Weys votetalk 04:54, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To the best of my knowledge, three is no such policy currently. WP:UP seems to be the curent relevant policy. Too many boxes can be confusing and unhelpful, however. DES (talk)
I don't think it makes sense to have a subjective guideline. We need hard numbers. Otherwise we are going to have the usual disputes. --Cyde Weys votetalk 21:47, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, this is one of many issues that this policy proposal should cover. I think a soft number would be most appropriate; that is, a number that will give people an idea when they have too many, but will not limit people if they need or want just a few more. A hard number just seems to inflexible to me, and I have no idea how we would ever determine what an appropriate number is. ~MDD4696 22:30, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
IMO this is and should be a matter of taste, not rule. I see no need for a rule on this, but if people suggest that a page has too many boxes to be helpfu, a user would be wise to listen. A user who ignores such warnings will quite likely find his or her othre views taken less seriously -- that is the real enforcemetn mechanism, IMO. DES (talk) 22:37, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
One of the things I did, to have a large amount of boxes without being disruptive is, hide them behind a special javascript. A link show/hide appears that is needed to see them. The original idea comes from the user Firefox, he deserves credit. -- Sneltrekker†My Talk 22:43, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think the soft limit is a good idea. A hard one would just be too arbitrary and opens the way to gaming of the policy. Johnleemk | Talk 02:39, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Even moreso than I oppose userbox content regulation, I think there is absolutely no reason to have a limit on the number of userboxes. Wikipedia is not paper, and user pages are a tiny drop in the bucket as far as space and bandwidth are concerned. Even editors who are generally against userboxes should note that a limit might be construed by many users as an endorsement to have approximately that number of userboxes (but no more). Brighterorange 04:32, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Since we limit page size, and since wikipedia isn't a web host, is it not worth instigating two points which would solve this problem?
  1. All templates in the user space are substituted. Links to non-substituted templates are removed.
  2. A maximum page size of 5-10k is placed on user pages.
Thoughts. Steve block talk 13:37, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's not a good idea. Templates are a useful way of coordinating changes across many uses, precisely how userboxes are used now. (And even if you hate userboxes, you must agree that there are MANY templates that would be useless if substituted, like Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects, etc.) We know that templates on user pages account for only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's storage, CPU, and bandwidth. Limiting the user page to something so small would also damage uncontroversial activities, such as drafting proposals and article rewrites within a subpage. And again, I contend that there is no problem with the number of userboxes that needs to be solved by more regulations. Brighterorange 18:26, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Good points made, and taken. I withdraw my suggestions. Looking at them again, the second one isn't going to work anyway, because talk pages would eat up a lot of space. Steve block talk 19:17, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed speedy deletion clause

There's a proposal to add a speedy delete criterion dealing with attack pages in the template space at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#A draft wording. Consensus on the idea and the wording is being sought. Steve block talk 19:21, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lots of proposed clauses - comments please

What userboxes are

  1. Userboxes are a standardized way of stating your views, beliefs and convictions for all to see and read on your user page. The policy of NPOV does not apply to the content of userboxes.
  2. Userboxes are a method of networking with other wikipedians with similar views/beliefs for the purpose of writing/improving NPOV encyclopedic content, or for non-Wikipedia purposes.
  3. Userboxes are only to be used on User pages (or sub-pages in the user namespace).

What userboxes are not

  1. Userboxes are not to be used on Wikipedia articles, or on any other page that is directly associated with the encyclopedia its self.
  2. Userboxes are not a method of canvasing other Wikipedians in an attempt to sway general opinion, or bias discussions or articles.
  3. Userboxes are not a method of locating Wikipedians for the purpose of attack/ridicule/criticism based on the beliefs/views displayed on their userpage.
  4. Userboxes are not to be used to determine the validity of a Wikipedian's comments/nominations during a discussion, nor the validity of a Wikipedian's edits of an article. Please assume good faith, and assume that every user is capable of NPOV contributes despite their own beliefs/views. No action should be taken against a Wikipedian as a result, in whole or in part, of the userboxes displayed on the Wikipedian's User page.

Proposed clauses written by gorgan_almighty 10:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comments please

  • I don't think there's much consensus for punishing those who rally others' votes and support with userboxes. It seems pretty clear that a determined canvaser would be able to do that pretty easily anyway, for example, by studying sympathetic edits to pertinent articles. There's no harm in simply discouraging the practice, but threats are way out of line. I would recommend merely striking "Any user caught doing this will be dealt with severely." --James S. 12:10, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • More comments please, I would like to integrate these clauses into the main proposal if there's no objections. —gorgan_almighty 12:23, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Oppose. I think "dealt with severely" for canvassing is WAY over the top. It's not a behaviour to encourage but it often doesn't give the result the canvasser wants anyway, I got canvassed, and I went and gave my opinion and I suspect it was in the opposite direction of what the canvasser was hoping for. It is true that these are objections in the minds of SOME but not that there is general consensus. So, I object to integrating these into the main proposal without significant refinement and softening. ++Lar: t/c 13:09, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • The "dealt with severely" line has already been struck through. I will remove it entirely. What else do you object to or would you refine in my proposed clauses?
      • Okay I've softened up not-4 a bit as well. What else should be changed? —gorgan_almighty 14:02, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
        • While #1 is fine, #2 needs changing. As I said, I'm not convinced being notified of something that is of interest to me is a bad thing. This is a wiki and notification doesn't mean you get 100% or even a majority, the way you want. Knowledge is power, knowledge is goodness. If you really want to keep it I think you might want to put in that it is OK to let people know of things that interest them, just not to advocate for votes a certain way. But that's hairsplittingly fine distinctionwise. How do you tell? Measure outcomes, not intent. #3 seems already covered under rules against personal attacks. #4 I like in principle, except that people will make up their minds as they like. We had someone state opposition to an ArbComm candidate because they had "too many userboxes". If #4 was in effect, they would have to have hid that viewpoint. I would prefer that if people cannot be unbiased, that they put their biases on the table instead of hiding them. So... basically, the whole thing seems like it's more rules than we need? In fact I think it may be time to go through the entire proposal looking for redundancy and for things to combine, eliminate, or reference to existing rules rather than repeat. ++Lar: t/c 15:42, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
          • My understanding of the consensus reached in the infamous TfD/userbox templates concerning beliefs and convictions is that canvasing for votes & other forms of vote stacking are damaging to the encyclopedia (although no consensus was reached as to how to prevent it). Most people agree that it should not be allowed, even those like me who support userboxes. That may not be your personal opinion, but my proposed clauses take into account the general consensus. As for your ArbComm example, the idea that someone is unsuitable because they have "too many userboxes" is just plain stupid. It makes sense to have a clause disallowing that. Just because someone did it doesn't mean it should be allowed. —gorgan_almighty 16:08, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
            • I guess I'd rather people put their biases on the table. I'll be voicing opposition to adminship/Bureaship/Arbship for that user baesd on that comment, should that user ever come up for any of those things. That's better than the user manufacturing some excuse and people not knowing how they really felt.++Lar: t/c 17:34, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I mostly agree with User:Lar's comments. #1 is good, #3 is redundant, and #4 is unenforceable. As for #2, I agree that vote stacking is usually bad, but there shouldn't be anything about it in the userbox rules, because it's not a userbox-specific problem. If there's a consensus for outlawing it, then that should be a separate policy. Personally, I think #1 should be the only rule.
  • How is #4 unenforcable? #4 can be quoted when someone nominates a user for banning "because he has userbox xxx on his user page" or an edit dispute arises because user A doesn't like user B editing the Muslim article because user B identifys as a Christian. The arbitrator can enact #4 in order to settle the dispute. #3 isn't really redundant because although it states already documented policy, it's doesn't hurt to restate it here, especially since userboxes offer a quick & easy way to attack a user for his beliefs. —gorgan_almighty 16:54, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Isn't "restated"=="redundant"? Doesn't restating rules just make the body of rules bigger? Wouldn't we be more well served with fewer, simpler, rules? They would be easier to understand for newcomers. Also, restatement means double maintenance if something changes, with all the attendant difficulty in finding all the restatements. All arguments against restatement I think. As for using #4 to settle disputes, in your example, user A doesn't have a case unless user B is introducing POV or unverifiable facts or whatever, no one owns articles. The userbox rule is not relevant to the case. Now, I applaud your efforts, but I'm not convinced. The more rules we add, the more reasons people have to WP:IAR. ++Lar: t/c 17:34, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Two possible situations where A's opinion has been influenced by B's userbox: either A explicitly states that he has been so influenced, or he keeps it to himself. In the first case, #4 is unnecessary because it's already wrong to dispute someone's edits for reasons like that. In the second case, #4 is unenforceable, because we can't see into A's head. You can't prove that someone has been influenced by something they've seen. Equalpants 18:22, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I, too, agree with Lar's points on this subject. Frankly, I also see no problem with canvassing. What we are trying to avoid is sockpuppetry, which is easily detectable. To prohibit canvassing is to say that "those users who are not embroiled in conflict already are not allowed to voice their opinion." I would very much welcome people coming to me and asking for my opinion on a subject currently in consideration, or to ask me to voice an opinion they already know. The reason for this is the size of my watchlist, and the fact that most of my edits take me nowhere near the politics of wikipedia. I suppose that means that I am condoning wikipedia "politicians," but we have already arrived at that place. We in fact have wikipedia paramilitary. The answer to this problem is not to forbid canvassing or expression of opinion, but to work with both sides to find commonality they can agree on. Avriette 20:22, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • I honestly feel that you are against the idea of any regulation, rather than my proposals in particular. Can we at least agree that the "What userboxes are" clauses are good? —gorgan_almighty 18:40, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • On the contrary, I am against your proposals for the specific reasons that I have given above: redundancy and unenforceability. (If I was against the idea of any regulation, I would have said that in the first place, rather than taking the time to make specific objections.) I agree that the "What userboxes are" clauses are good, as well as "What userboxes are not" clause #1. Equalpants 19:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • I guess I should chime in too. I'm not against regulation, rules, process, procedures etc, where they make sense. The "what userboxes are" section seems spot on, clearly userboxes are all those things. But I'm not sure where it goes. Is it prefatory on the policy page to the statement of policies? Where I am coming from in critiquing and questioning the "are not" parts is that simple, clear, and consistent rules and policies are easier to adhere to, easier to apply, easier to enforce, and perceived as fairer than complex, unclear, or inconsistent ones. What I see now with WP in general is a confusing welter of rules, policies, guidelines, proposed guidelines, informal defacto rules, admins doing IAR end runs and etc. This is not the place for a general rant but I've ranted already that reducing complexity and increasing consistency will get more buyin and less need for end runs. That's not a critique of your efforts by any means. In an ideal world the WP:Five Pillars would be all that is needed, but apparently we do need more. As little more as possible would be the preference. Sorry for the long comment! Hope it helps. ++Lar: t/c 20:31, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How do user boxes help make a better encyclopedia?

There appears to be a mountain of information on the general subject of user boxes here, at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion, and in the talk pages of dozens of templates. The only information of interest to me is, "How do user boxes help make a better encyclopedia?" If this section were dedicated to only proponents of user-boxes explaining the answer to that question, it would allow people like me to get the heart of the matter. --Peace Inside 19:15, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The only way any group of diverse editors can hope to achieve a NPOV is if they have a pretty good understanding of each others' points of view, biases, backgrounds, predilictions, etc. Userboxes make that easy, by automatically serving up the most popular categories and inviting people to put an attractive colorful emblem on their self-description. The only better way to make sure that editors understand each others' POV would be to give people a manditory survey (the results of which would probably end up looking a lot like userboxes, only with scales with floating-point values and therefore much more confusing) but that would discourage new editors. The voluntary userbox system seems like the best of all possible situations along those lines. James S. 19:44, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sometimes when I see that someone is a Democrat or Republican or whatever on their use page, I also look to see if that POV is reflected in their edits. This helps me spot POV and NPOV editors. Howard Zinn, in the introduction of his book A People's History of the United States states that every historian has a POV, it is just that most of them are not honest about what it is. I have heard people complain about Wikipedia by saying that some articles are writen with a POV. I say to them, Yes, that is exactly what makes Wikipedia better than any other encyclopedia. It is possible to discern what the POV of an article is. Talk pages and edit histories are rich with this information, and Userboxes add another layer to this. With other encyclopedias there is no easy mechanism to tell what the point of view of an article is. I have learned as much or more from the debates on talk pages than I have from the articles that were being discussed because I was able to get an understanding of the different points of view of the editors and the conflicting opinions. This is part of the beauty of Wikipedia. We talk about NPOV as being some sort of absolute truth, as if the articles will be totally neutral. I think this is the wrong interpretation of NPOV. In my view, NPOV is a process of making POV apparent. -- Samuel Wantman 11:03, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We don't need userboxes to state our opinions on our user pages. You can write "I am an avid supporter of (politician X) though I oppose his party's policies on (issue Y) and I think that X did his county a great disservice through his actions with respect to Z." Indeed this says a lot more than any facile bumper sticker. The difference between writing your opinion on your user page and putting a userbox up is that the latter can easily be abused (and has been in the recent past) for the purpose of campaigning. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 12:53, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As a person with an MBA, even though wiki is not-for-profit, let me tell you the same principles apply here as in business. Userboxes help users (employees) write an encyclopedia the same way Barnstars do: They make users (employees) feel good (through self-expression) and make them more likely to contribute. Happy users are productive users. Also, neophytes, like me, learn about technical things (programming syntax, how to upload images, fair use, etc.) in the course of making userboxes. I should also note that the whole userbox controversy has forced me (and I'm sure many other users)to become much more aware of wiki's rules of order, processes, etc. that I would not have otherwise. It would be an enlightened management/administrative decision to keep them. Lawyer2b 14:50, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to add a bit to Lawyer2b's comment. I think nobody has considered here that userboxes can be a unifying factor in the community. Several times users have come to my talk page to ask me for information, (as an example) about firearms. Recently, I was wandering through userspace, and found that there are several users who are in fact for gun control (whereas I am not). One of the nice features of the wikipedia is I can collaborate on articles with other people who do not share the same viewpoint sa I do. I have run into this several times in the past, and feel that each time, the resolution has been amicable. While I am not in favor of wearing my politics on my sleeve, I appreciate that others are willing to do so. It means I know who to talk to when I have a question (such as somebody opposed to the "house of Saud"), or want a counterpoint to something I've written. I could speculate as to why people are so opposed to userboxes, but I think this fundamental truth has been missed (or ignored). Avriette 20:16, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I completely disagree with the notion that seeing someone's political or ideological stand is helpful in spotting a POV editor. An article should stand on its own without knowledge of the writer's personal beliefs. You should be able to understand whether an article is NPOV without knowing the author's beliefs. That's what multiple source documents and verification is for. And, indeed, understanding the author's beliefs my actually skew your interpreation of the article and cause you to read a POV slant that does not otherwise exist. For example, you may read an article about, say, American involvement in Iraq, and wonder if it's NPOV. You read, one of the editor's User Page and see that he/she states, "This user is a supporter of George W. Bush." Might that influence your view of the article? Yes! Should it? No! Let the article stand on its merit. In my opinion, the editor was silly to state his personal opinion, as any journalist would be, but use the cited references and the writing itself to judge the POV/NPOV of the article, not the author's User Page. Crunch 19:25, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't this one of those when did you stop beating your wife questions? Steve block talk 20:36, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No point in categorizing

There seems to be little point in including a category on every user box. Templates have this nifty little "whatlinkshere" function that does exactly the same. Hence, the cats are redundant. Radiant_>|< 23:12, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The point (and I'm not advocating for or against) is that it links all these users to higher level categories of Wikipedians. This adds a little more visibility to userboxes and groups of likeminded editors. What I find troubling is that these templates end up on other pages that then end up in the categories. --Samuel Wantman 10:43, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a valid point, in that the category namesape is in general part of the encylopedia, whilst userspace is not. Perhaps whats needed is a non-encyclopedic caterory namespace (and for that matter template namespace) Something like User:Category: which would basically be the whole Wikipedians namespace. --Salix alba 20:59, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

- - - (squeak) - - -

If I may squeak up? I have absolutely no answers to any of the questions raised, yet. So you might want to skip this section if you are seeoking answers.

Anyway, I wish I had the certainty that so many have! I have mostly questions, and I'm still struggling to come up with even the right questions. But I don't feel able to address this issue until I do have more answers:

  • What does it mean to have a "public face" in in a virtual organization? What are the purposes of a "public face", the benefits, the price?
  • What is the emotional cost of a given (userpage) policy? Can this reduce or even negate the purely technical organizational benefit of the policy? How? In what circumstances? How can one know?
  • What other organizations have faced some simulcrum of these challanges? What worked, what didn't, and why? Can any of these lessons be applied to Wikipedia?

But even these questions exist in a larger framework:

  • Why does the group "people who work on Wikipedia" even exist? It doesn't make sense, does it? There's no pay, and after all there is already a decent encyclopedia. Answering that question -- the answer to be multifaceted, I am sure -- might be the first step toward beginning to answer the question of what policies and structures (userpage and other) are most likely to be best.
  • I haven't seen much discussion of it, but it seems that WP is under stress from an influx of new users, and that this issue is a manifestation of that stress. Is it necessary to fight out that issue on this line (userboxes)? And quickly? (I'm not saying it's not; I don't know. I'm not even in this fight; but I would hope that those who are do understand what the fight is partly about, in the larger sense.)

So why am I posting? Right. I am thinking of a place where people interested in these questions can share information, probably under the umbrella of Wikipedia:WikiProject Community. Anyone interested, message me. Herostratus 05:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User page disclaimer

Would it be an idea to run a disclaimer along the top of each user page, to the effect that any and all opinions expressed here are the opinions of the individuals in question and are not endorsed nor held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia itself? That might be one move which could solve some concernss that people might have regarding the opinions expressed there-in. Steve block talk 18:15, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That seems reasonable to me. Is there any reason talk pages shouldn't have such a disclaimer? —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 18:37, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think a better notice would be: "This is a talk page. Any and all opinions expressed here are the opinions of the individuals in question, and not necessarily the opinions of the Wikimedia Foundation or the Wikipedia Encyclopaedia." I'm not a lawyer; suggestions welcome here, or preferably, my talk page. — Ian Manka Questions? Talk to me! 14:49, 15 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Traditional wiki values"?

A recent addition to the "concerns about regulating userboxes" section says, "The userbox controversy has illuminated ideological splits between believers in "traditional" Wiki values, and volumes of editors much more active in talk space and projects, than in adding to the Encyclopaedia." This statement is problematic. First of all, it's not clear how this is a concern about regulating userboxes as much as a general (albeit relevant) observation about the userbox controversy and the Wikipedia community as a whole. I'm not sure it belongs in that section (although I can't see a better place for it, unless it's "Background".)

Second, although the "ideological split" referred to is undeniable, the description of the two sides strikes me as terribly biased. The reference to "traditional Wiki values" is unclear at best and incendiary at worst, and the characterization of the "volumes of editors" is unneccessarily pejorative. Is there any evidence that supporters of userboxes as a whole are more active in talk space and projects than in article space? (I'm sure there are a number of individual users to whom this characterization applies, but it seems inappropriately sweeping to me.)

It might be better to say, "The userbox controversy has illuminated an ideological split between editors (mostly, but not exclusively, new Wikipedians) who see talk space and projects as community-building exercises helpful to the encyclopedia project, and editors (mostly, but not exclusively, Wikipedians of long standing) who see them as distracting and disruptive to the overall health of the encyclopedia." But then, perhaps that's too POV to the other side. Is that wording neutral enough, or does someone have a better one? —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 18:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How big is the problem?

I've been looking through the December database dump to see how common the use of of these boxes are. Generally they only seem to be used by a small (less than 10) number of people. Those which might raise an eyebrow include 

     17 {{User_atheist}}
     14 {{User Drug-free}}
     11 {{User_liberty}}
     11 {{User atheist}}

in total there were 1642 full list. In comparison the two big hits were 

  34230 {{newbie}}
   1208 {{User en}}

The use of these templates generally follows Zipf's law with most templates only used a few times. There were 18 with 10 links, 27 with 9, 29 with 8, 29 with 7, 57 with 5, 30 with 6, 57 with 5, 70 with 4, 102 with 3, 119 with 2 and 945 with only one link.

Note these stats are from 14 Dec 05, just before the explosion/userbox debate. I'm eagerly awaiting the next dump for comparison. If the figures above are anything to go by it seems like the penetration of userboxes is very small. --Salix alba 21:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Have you looked at Wikipedia:Userboxes/Wikipedia#Position? Someone, I presume in the interest of completeness, has created userboxes for Bureaucrats and ArbComs, and nominees for those positions. I don't see that anyone is using those. I wonder how many other userbox templates also have zero users? -- Dalbury(Talk) 22:45, 16 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't use images

[2] Developer Jamesday has requested that images only be used for content, not decoration. The reason for this is that images cause a major server load problem; the actual size of the image is not really relevant. Hence, please remove images from userbox templates, and use formatted or colored text instead. Radiant_>|< 11:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This makes sense. There is a noticable delay when trying to load pages with lots of userboxes on them. We need to limit the number of images per page and currently lots of userboxes = lots of images. So we either need to have fewer boxes on user pages or remove the images from them. --CBD ☎ ✉ 13:19, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This applies to other templates, as well. I'm not sure where is the best place to bring it up, but we may need to develop a policy or guideline on the use of images in all templates (instruction creep rears its ugly head again). -- Dalbury(Talk) 14:22, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • That is true. I've made a similar request about stub templates, and have been removing images from a number of maintenance templates. Adding a line or two to Wikipedia:Templates may be useful. Radiant_>|< 15:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    • Would this mean that ALL image links not used in articlespace really ought to be delinked? Even things like barnstars, the guideline/policy/rejected symbols, etc? How bad is it? Yikes! ++Lar: t/c 15:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm sure that users can have a few images on their user page. However, userbox templates are a way of adding lots of images to lots of user pages; userpages with over a dozen userboxen are far too common these days. This also means that people should refrain from putting images in their signature, which also adds lots of images to lots of pages. Finally, I'm not sure why the text "this page is policy" needs an icon. Radiant_>|< 15:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I posted some technical questions about this here: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Questions re server load from images in userspace. Might want to check that later to see if anyone replied.Herostratus 23:04, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Note from Jimbo

I wonder if you might consider...

I wonder if you might consider simply removing your political/religious/etc. userboxes and asking others to do the same. This seems to me to be the best way to quickly and easily end the userbox wars.

Userboxes of a political or, more broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project. They are attractive to the wrong kinds of people, and they give visitors the wrong idea of what it means to be a Wikipedian.

I think rather than us having to go through a mass deletion (which is what is likely to happen if the userbox fad doesn't go away), it will be better to simply change the culture, one person at a time. Will you help me?--Jimbo Wales 10:53, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely...we should never divide ourselves by any kind of faction and the political-religious userboxes are banners that only help to polarize the community.--MONGO 11:04, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed! I had already removed any userboxes from my user page that even hinted at a viewpoint. -- Dalbury(Talk) 12:31, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to try removing user categories from these political/religious/etc userboxes. This categorization is probably the worst aspect of userboxes and serves little purpose other than to allow people to identifies other users with a certain POV. Carbonite | Talk 14:49, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Template:User Infobox is another alternative along these lines... basically it allows the same sort of information to be displayed in a standardized format, but since it is all just displayed text there are no categories linked to it. --CBD ☎ ✉ 15:08, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can put images in Template:User Infobox, and the images and/or messages can still be divisive. There are other reasons to not use images in userboxes, but those are being discussed elsewhere. I think Jimbo is right, we need to encourage everybody to stop using userboxes that reflect political, religious or other polemical viewpoints. -- Dalbury(Talk) 15:33, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Um, people can put divisive images or messages directly on their user pages too... and did for a long time before userboxes came along. Ditto for potentially divisive user categories. Both absolutely ought to be discouraged, but the development which has prompted recent concern on these issues is the userbox+categorization dynamic. Userboxes effectively serve as 'advertising' which automatically puts people into categories which can then be used to promote factionalism. Carbonite's idea of removing categories from userboxes might help with that, but is likely to be resisted and people looking to organize factions can still check 'What links here' from the userboxes. The User Infobox gets rid of the categories and uniquely identifying templates in a self-selecting way. Can people still put factional images/messages in them? Sure, just as they can directly on the user page. Working to reduce that is a separate issue which goes back to the first userpages and forward for the life of the project. The 'User Wikipedian2' (and slightly less 'in your face' 'User Wikipedian') templates Tony suggests are 'advertising' for the non-ideological approach along those lines. As is Jimbo's message. --CBD ☎ ✉ 16:03, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Anybody wondering what to replace those political and polemical badges with: Template:User Wikipedian2 --Tony Sidaway|Talk 15:35, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah...ship it over to Wikipedia:WikiProject userboxes let em munch on it for awhile. I have to agree that Dalbury is correct on Jimbo's comment...it's the devisive userboxes that have to go.--MONGO 15:41, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Nice. I've put the following on my user and talk pages:
Jimbo Wales has asked that we consider removing all userboxes expressing a political, religious or, more generally, polemical point of view from our user pages. Please see Wikipedia talk:Proposed policy on userboxes#Note from Jimbo.
-- Dalbury(Talk) 15:46, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but the last time I checked, this is what userboxes are for! Userboxes are here to categorize users not to be simply a label. Christians put up christian userboxes so that they will be known as christian! Am I the only one that sees this? --Shell 15:49, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes, of course that's what they are for. And that's why they should be discouraged. Here we are Wikipedians. That means a commitment to neutrality and leaving an attitude of representing a particular faction should be left at the door. And it isn't just the problem of existing users, but rather what signal we are sending to newcomers in the community. Ideally, we want newcomers to come in and feel that, wow, here is the first place on the Internet where people are discussing and finding compromises about how to present purely factual information and leaving the POV warring outside. Gee, the conversation is so calm and rational and grounded in facts, you can barely even tell what the participants own views are! Well, that's our tradition, but it is slipping away, and userboxes are a part of the problem.--Jimbo Wales 16:02, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am a Jain. Do you think I will treat a user differently if I see that he is a Muslim? You notice that what you are doing is removing individuality, right? This is too alike to a communist nation for me. You are persecuting individuality and I can not support any such site, foundation or person that does this. --Shell 16:08, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Heh... establishing individuality by identifying oneself with a group. The world is a very strange place. :] --CBD ☎ ✉ 16:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How do you identify yourself? With where you were born? With what gender you are? What your name is? Your age? Your job? These are groups. You are identifying yourself with a group. That is how people work. We want to be with other people like us. That is why we group. --Shell 16:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I'm Conrad. Nice to meet ya. :] --CBD ☎ ✉ 16:28, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Which answer would you prefer from me: "Hell, no", "Fuck, no", "Absolutely not", "Never", or just plain "No"? What happened to Wikipedia is not censored? —CJ Marsicano 16:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it ran afoul of Wikipedia:Civility and was never heard from again. :] --CBD ☎ ✉ 16:37, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
What was that Ben Franklin quote again? Cjmarsicano 16:40, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
"Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One." -Franklin --CBD ☎ ✉ 16:49, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That's not the one I was thinking of. Something to do with giving up liberty? Cjmarsicano 18:13, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How about "okay, thank you for starting Wikipedia Mr Wales and putting in so many years of your life to making it the site it is today, and I don't mind acceding to your humble request because it's not really asking much more than to stand in harmony with other Wikipedians"? No? Bugger. I thought we were on a winner there. - Mark 16:18, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is Wikipedia a fascist state now - or just as evil, a branch of Fox News? I don't read from rightist scripts, thank you. —CJ Marsicano 16:31, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, CJ Marsicano. Wikipedia is about freedom. This is freedom. You are opressing freedom as well as individuality. --Shell 16:19, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Noone prevents you from stating your beliefs on your user page. The current dispute is about if we want wikipedia to become a webcommunity of teenagers with colorful little boxes or if wikipedia is about writing an encyclopedia. For the second, a user box stating that you are christian/muslim/pagan or whatever is useless if you don't contribute to articles about the topic. And if you contribute, everyone can derive this easier from your membership in a wiki project or the history of the articles. In sum: it's not about freedom, it's about good or bad taste. --84.153.123.74 16:26, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'll gladly continue to contribute articles, but Wikipedia is not getting one red cent from me in donations until the Kelly Martins of the Wikiworld permanently mind their own goddamn business regarding what goes on user pages. —CJ Marsicano 16:31, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I propose that no donations are given to wikipeida until this opression is stopped. --Shell 16:35, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
A little more civility would likely lead to a more productive discussion. Carbonite | Talk 16:39, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Leaving what is on our userpages alone would definitely lead to everyone getting back to the business of helping write an encylopedia. Cjmarsicano 16:42, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you want your user page to remain "left alone", why are you using templates? Subst all your userbox if you want a stable user page. Carbonite | Talk 16:45, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you'd let us in on this little secret, maybe we all might. It seems a hell of a lot more reasonable and realistic than Mr. Wales' suggestion. Cjmarsicano 16:50, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, I'm talking about template substitution, which expands a template into code. Since the template is no longer transcluded, the code on your user page would be stable and unaffected by changes to the template. You can read more about it here. Carbonite | Talk 16:54, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You're free to not donate, but the Board/Jimbo is free not to pay for the upkeep of the servers hosting your userboxes. They're free to ban you from using their private property. People who are calling this "communist" are very good at ignoring one's property rights. ;) Johnleemk | Talk 16:39, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
People who call this "communist" are using the wrong terminology. It's actually fascism. You know, like the Third Reich or the current Bush Administration. Cjmarsicano 16:46, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm! Jimbo asks very politely for help in changing the culture of Wikipedia, and you call that fascism? I probably will regret saying this, but I can't help noticing who is being civil and who isn't in this discussion. -- Dalbury(Talk) 17:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmmm? The "fascist" remark wasn't directed at Mr. Wales - I was being more general. I was only correcting Johnleemk (who is otherwise a pretty cool guy, and who I've had the pleasure of dealing with in a mediation several weeks ago.) As for any alleged civility issues, I've been holding my tongue quite nicely and only listed the "Fuck, no" option earlier to make a point (and a joke). And no, I wasn't trying to disrupt Wiki to make a point either. Sheesh. Cjmarsicano 18:08, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, my mistake. I thought this discussion was about Jimbo's request. I obviously missed something. As for your reply to Jimbo being a joke, humor doesn't filter very well through the Internet. -- Dalbury(Talk) 18:22, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia is not a democracy. What Jimbo and/or the Wikimedia Foundation Board says goes. There is no innate right to edit Wikipedia, no innate right to "fairness" on Wikipedia, no innate right to even having a say on what goes on your userpage, beyond what the Board/Jimbo allows us to. They've given us a free hand in most things, and I don't see what's the real big fuss here. (Note: I still have a political userbox on my webpage, but it's never been categorised, and AFAIK, I'm the only one who uses it.) Johnleemk | Talk 16:39, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, then, maybe some major changes need to be made to the WFB then? Cjmarsicano 16:42, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, if wikipedia is not a democracy, we'll remove all votes, remove all admins except jimbo, disallow expression, elect jimbo as the permanent leader, ban all disagreeing users and make it a paid service. --Shell 16:54, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a democracy and never has been. For the most part it's gone along pretty well and people are given a good deal of leeway with what we can ha--Shell 17:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)ve on our user pages—which, really, belong to the project, and not any individual user. Jimbo is the benevolent leader who mostly doesn't step in unless something is really really important to him and even then usually he only makes polite requests. This was a pretty polite request and it might be better to discuss why you're so strongly opposed to it instead of reacting so harshly. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 16:57, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Read what I said before. Since wikipedia "is not a democracy," follow my suggestions. --Shell 16:59, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
I did read it. You seem to have a mistaken idea of what it means to not be a democracy; it doesn't imply any particular way of running things at all, other than that one method in particular doesn't necessarily govern everything. Why not follow my suggestion—and state why is this so important to you? You've claimed it's oppressing your freedoms, but I'm wondering what freedoms you thought you had that are being oppressed. No one is asking you not to be a Christian or a Jain or a Muslim or a Write In Mickey Mouse for President party member or whatever you are. No one is saying that you can't say that you are. What is being said is that the standard-looking boxes categorizing and identifying users were disrupting the process of building the project as users used it to factionalize, and that since they seem to be counterproductive, it would be best if people would remove them. (I find it interesting that this is so important to you, as your signature doesn't even link to a userpage!) Mindspillage (spill yours?) 17:18, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I will, once again, put this very simply. If this is not a democracy, remove all votes. --Shell 17:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

If you support me and cjmarsicano's view, add {{user:Cjmarsicano/UDUIW}} to your userpage. --Shell 17:17, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

  • This may not be a democracy, in a country-sense, but last time i checked, it was partially. I call for all you sheep to following the group - this is not a dictatorship! I like my political views both on my user page and in real-life. We go on and on about not offending someone but, to tell you the truth, this is getting pretty close to offending me! I like showing a point of view, thats the sort of thing we fought for in WW2 - freedom. If you like free wikipedia where we can have discussions like this, then support me and Sh in this democratic movement (because Wikipedia is a democracy in a partial sense, otherwise freedom to gain knowledge and discuss would not be present). I'd go into a Winston Churchill-type speech right now, but I dont have that much time or vision as that late, great man did. - • Dussst • T | C 18:02, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, this is not a democracy in any sense. It is an encyclopedia. Yes, speech should be free, but only in the sense that the encyclopedia seeks to be neutral - and so neither excludes not reflects any individual point of view. As to the rest, it is not a matter of 'free speech' vs 'opressed speech', but rather that all speech must be seeking the ends of an NPOV encyclopedia. If you want to express yourself otherwise, or be an individual for its own sake - that's OK, but perhaps an encyclopedia project may not be the best place to do it. (comments toned down per TS below)--Doc ask? 18:28, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Let's tone it down a bit--it isn't in the interests of the encyclopedia to alienate members of the community unnecessarily. Jimbo has asked us all, as individuals, to remove political and polemic userboxes from our userpages, in the interests of Wikipedia. Let's all stop attacking one another for disagreeing over this suggestion, and as individuals, consider it on its merits and edit our userpages accordingly.

Maybe the fad, if that is what it is, will die a natural death. Maybe it won't, in which case it may be necessary to remove the divisive ones. This wouldn't prevent those who want to have such statements on their userpages from using the "subst" command to place the statements directly on their pages. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 18:37, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User box commentary from Jimbo's page

Some interesting stuff from Jimbo's talk page. There are a couple of other threads going on the issue but much of it is just flaming and this talk page is already enormous. Marskell 17:52, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The boxes are so much a part of the culture and there are so many of them that eliminating the troublesome ones will be difficult. I'm certainly struck by how many seem to serve no other purpose than provocation.

As a starting point maybe add a caveat to the Wikipedia:Userboxes page: the primary purpose of user boxes and user categories should be to alert other Wikipedians to ways you might aid them in editing. For instance, if you speak speak a second language or have professional expertise in a technical field other users will know they can contact you for assistance. User boxes that are designed to provoke or offend or reflect a POV but no expertise are generally discouraged.

So, it's good if a box alerts me to the fact a user speaks Arabic or is an astrophysicist, but whether "this user prefers that the death penalty be used far more often" or "supports the legalization of all drugs for adults" is irrelevant to how I deal with them as a Wikipedian. Marskell 13:17, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Go forth and spread this wisdom my friend. :-) I agree with you completely. The classic tradition of Wikipedia is that I do not know the politics or religion of major contributors, and the better their ability to write good encyclopedia articles, the less I am able to guess it. And honestly, it doesn't matter.
My hope for a solution is one of gentle kindness and a request of people who are overusing them. Rather than force our culture down the throats of newbies, we must educate them. Listen, we must say, here we are Wikipedians and while we acknowledge that we all bring biases, we do everything we can to minimize them here.
I should add, because the question comes up in these discussions, that I see nothing wrong with someone telling about themselves on their userpage in a thoughtful comment. It should ideally be of the form "I am active in my local church, and hold strong beliefs on certain religious and moral issues. I try hard to be sure that my beliefs do not lead to biased editing, and if you ever feel that I am pushing a particular perspective, please let me know kindly, because I really don't want to do that." That's a lot better than a userbox. --Jimbo Wales 15:56, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm rather of two minds on the whole userbox thing. On the one hand, I see some value to giving some indication of "where you're coming from" regarding any personal attributes or beliefs of yours that might potentially affect your viewpoint and help others understand why you're doing whatever it is you're doing. On the other hand, I see the problems, current and potential, which arise from people using this site as a place to stake out positions and go into battle behind the flag of their own belief system. I also see a lot of silliness in the way userboxes are being used by some people who seem to want to collect them like stamps or baseball cards, filling their pages with a huge array of sometimes-redundant, sometimes-contradictory boxes. I've seen some userpages with several dozen different boxes expressing some nuance or flavor of the concept that they regard themselves as transgendered; OK, I "got it" the first time. Lest anyone think I'm picking on the transgendered, there are plenty of other groups that do similar things; some right-wing nationalists have several dozen boxes expressing variations on the viewpoint that their country is the greatest in the world, their political leaders are always right, their wars are always just, and their enemies are all evil. All of this is rubbing it on way too thick; on the other hand, I wouldn't really object to somebody giving a brief indication of their nationality, religion, and political and sexual preference (preferably along the lines of what they support, not what they hate). By the way, my only userbox besides the original and uncontroversial Babel boxes is one indicating my Myers-Briggs INTJ personality; is that considered biased now too? *Dan T.* 16:49, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is is an excellent commentary on the subtleties of the issue.--Jimbo Wales 17:09, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Death to the INTJ'r infidels! We of the INFJ faction are the only True Wikipedians! :] --CBD ☎ ✉ 17:30, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A wise man once said:

Diplomacy consists of combining honesty and politeness. Both are objectively valuable moral principles. Be honest with me, but don't be mean to me. Don't misrepresent my views for your own political ends. And I'll treat you the same way.

When I came to Wikipedia a little over a month ago, I came to check on some controversial issues with which I have become familiar. When I saw who had made some edits that seemed suspicious, I looked at their user page. I also looked at the userpages of those editors who seemed to be making the best contributions. Those who were honest about their point of view, whether with userboxes or equivalent personal statements, were much easier to understand as editors, and in my view, were more likely to edit without an agenda.

Everyone has a point of view. The only way we can hope to achieve neutrality is if we all understand each other's point of view. Userboxes make that easier. The only reason I have placed a column of userboxes on my userpage is so that other editors might understand my point of view, and so that we might together achieve a neutral point of view. Trying to pretend that every individual doesn't have a point of view is like trying to pretend that everyone doesn't have emotions, or a background.

I think you need to look again at the kind of people who use userboxes, and the kind of people you want to attract. What proportion of vandals, hoaxers, spammers, and blocked users bother to be honest about their point of view with userboxes? Please let me know if that proportion is not at least an order of magnitude below the proportion of the community as a whole.

Is there an easier way to be honest about our points of view than userboxes? Is squelching individual points of view honest? Will squeching points of view ever be able to achive neutrality in editing as well as announcing them? Why then not make it as easy and attractive as possible to make such an announcement? --James S. 17:33, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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