Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 1/3/06, slimvirgin(a)gmail.com
<slimvirgin(a)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