[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Wed Jan 4 00:40:37 UTC 2006

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/3/06, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Tony, I agree these are a problem, but I'm not very familiar with
>>them, so I have a question. What is the difference between having a
>>box on your page saying you're e.g. Hindu, and having yourself listed
>>in a Hindu Wikipedians category?
>>
>
>None.  It is the categorization that is the problem, facilitated to
>some extent by the convenience of userboxes (the ease of typing {{user
>bigendinan}} compared to "[[Category: Bigendian wikipedians]]).
>
>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.
>
But people have been doing that all along by making lists of like
minded users on their user pages, all watching the same articles,
setting up WikiProjects, etc. I think the difference is that the
number of editors is now so large that some special-interest topics
can now have 20-30 who share a POV, many of whom are new and/or
have never had enough contact with the generalists to pick up the
right habits of thought. The userboxes look more like a symptom
rather than a cause.

It would be interesting to have some way in which specialists
can't form a "consensus" completely unilaterally, in the way that
university departments bring in members of other departments for
tenure evaluations and the like, trying to prevent inbreeding.

Stan