[WikiEN-l] Time to finish this userbox war once and for all

Thu Feb 23 02:11:43 UTC 2006

I have a very hard time using them for this purpose. Even the Babel
ones. I was looking for a good German speaker not too long ago. The
problem is, I needed someone who was 1. fluent in German, 2. fluent in
English, 3. had a good chance of being online soon.

The Babel boxes were really no help in this -- unless I'm totally out
of the loop, I don't know of any way to do a JOIN type query in this
(i.e. both native German and English speakers), and both of those
categories individually have far too many people to look them over in
any sort of systematic way. And of course none of that really gets at
the question of who has recently edited. In the end I just gave up on
trying to find someone (eventually someone the text I wanted
translated, which worked just as well, but of course the fact that it
was a relatively common language on En helped with that).

Sure -- there are other solutions. I could go to the Village Pump or
the De wiki Village Pump or a number of other places. And I'm not
saying that I find Babel useless -- they are very helpful as
*descriptive* tags. But I couldn't figure out a good way to actively
*find* someone with them, as the level of information they give me
(long lists of users associated with a single language) is useless for
this.

FF

On 2/22/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Honestly, does anyone actually use these userboxes to find experts?
> This is a genuine question: I have never done so. Does anyone
> regularly use userbox categories or "what links here" on userbox
> templates to locate people who are experts in certain fields to help
> with a project?
>
> Steve
>
> On 2/22/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I certainly don't want suggestion 3 to be done. Wikipedians by field of
> > interest and any category that shows specific Wikipedian knowledge and
> > expertise have a use in the project and would be deleted with this
> > suggestion just because a few people have been warring.
> >
> > And what is the use in banning images on userboxes when they are to be
> > hardcoded anyway?
> >
> > How about we get around the table and decide on what type of user
> > categorization and boxes would be acceptable?
> >
> > Acceptable:
> > 1) Admin status
> > 2) WikiProject membership
> > 3) Skills (fields of interest)
> > 4) Languages
> > 5) System information (IE, Firefox, Windows, Linux, etc.)
> >
> > Anything I missed?
> >
> > Unacceptable:
> > ???
> >
> >
> > On 2/22/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > > It seems difficult to follow one of these two positions without
> > > > losing  a
> > > > significant number of great contributors, so we need to come up
> > > > with some
> > > > sort of compromise solution. This is mainly just a collation of
> > > > various
> > > > suggestions, but I wondered what people think of it as a solution
> > > >
> > > > 1. The only userpage templates that are allowed in Template space
> > > > are those
> > > > of direct relevance to the project - e.g. babel, {{userpage}},
> > > > {{WikimediaNoLicensing}} etc.
> > >
> > > Workable.
> > >
> > > > 2. Userboxes cannot be 'transcluded' from user subpages - the only
> > > > allowed
> > > > way to have a userbox is to copy the source code for it (this wouldn't
> > > > preclude Wikiproject Userboxes from having a list of boxen, all
> > > > they would
> > > > have to do is have a list of code rather than a list of {{user
> > > > userbox}}
> > > > template calls
> > >
> > > Problematic. My user page actually transcludes lots of things from
> > > subpages within my own user space. Perhaps disallow transcluding from
> > > within other people's userspaces?
> > >
> > > > 3. Userboxes are not allowed to use images or categories. In fact all
> > > > 'Wikipedians by...' categories (except Wikipedians by location and
> > > > other
> > > > categories whose existence is of evident utility to the project)
> > > > should be
> > > > deleted (can we add something to CSD to this effect, assuming there
> > > > isn't
> > > > already?)
> > >
> > > I think the thing to do here is to restrict use of Wikipedia user
> > > categories instead of banning categories and images from userboxes
> > > outright. Userboxes have legitimate categorical use when it comes to
> > > adminship, Babel, and Wikiproject membership.
> > >
> > > > 2 and 3 are meant to stop 'vote stuffing' - the other major gripe
> > > > people
> > > > have with boxen. Fair use images in userboxes are already not
> > > > allowed (since
> > > > they aren't fair use at all in  boxen), and allowing public domain/FDL
> > > > images would give us precisely the same vote-stuffing problems that we
> > > > currently have with categories
> > >
> > > But images aren't problematic for non-vote-stuffing userboxes, unless
> > > you believe that all admins or all members of WikiProject Wikipedians
> > > for Writing an Encyclopedia can be trusted to reliably vote the same
> > > way :)
> > >
> > > --
> > > Philip L. Welch
> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch
> > >
> > >
> > >
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