[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Wed Jan 4 00:19:20 UTC 2006

On 1/3/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Categorization people by skill or by services provided is a good use
> of user boxes.  But the beliefs and religions userboxes provide a
> handy telephone book for people interested in pushing a point of view
> an unscrupulous enough to spam user talk pages or contact likely
> supporters by email.
>
> The categories must die too.

I agree. I hadn't even thought of that until Kelly mentioned it: that
the boxes can be used to group editors via "what links here" and
thereby influence editing and votes. Jimbo's point that when we log in
we're Wikipedians,
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-December/035945.html
(and not Democrats, pro-lifers, or whatever) could perhaps be written
into policy explicitly somewhere, and anything detrimental to that,
including some categories, be regarded as a violation of the policy.

Sarah