[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Tue Jan 3 15:49:59 UTC 2006

On 1/3/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

So it will terminaly mess with the edit counters at WP:RFA.

> 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.

So people admit their bias upfront. Handy.

>
> 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.

Alturnitivly we could spend the time it would take to kill them on
writeing articles about canals.

--
geni