[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Tue Jan 3 14:06:47 UTC 2006

December 2005 saw a fivefold increase in edits on pages in template
space whose titles started with the characters "User_".  From about
1200 in November, the number of such edits rose to 6100.

Userboxes started innocously enough, first seeing widespread use with
the Babel project, intended to inform users of one another's language
skills.  But they haven't stayed that way.  From helping editors to
locate one another by skill, they have evolved into a way for editors
to group by conviction.  Last month one editor used userbox
information to locate dozens of people who shared his religious
persuasion in an overt attempt to destroy the consensual
decision-making process of Wikipedia.  The religious userbox page
(yes, such a page exists) lists some fifty userboxes intended to
identify and group editors by expressed religion.  There is also a
page for grouping according to political ideology.

The scope for abuse  of these userboxes has been amply demostrated. 
They fulfil no function useful to the encyclopedia that isn't done
equally well by simply stating one's affiliations on one's user page. 
They must die.