[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Wed Jan 4 14:18:50 UTC 2006

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>On 1/4/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>When the house is on fire, you don't hold a discussion.  It's been
>>>suggested elsewhere that the usera engaged in this fad are not regular
>>>editors.   They can go back to wherever they came from.
>>>
>>
>>The house isn't on fire.
>>
>
>Have you examined the figures?   This is a massive growth.  Political
>and belief-based userboxes have increased tenfold since the end of
>November.  A database check tells me that of our 3500 or so userboxes,
>1500 were created in December, and a further 250 have been created in
>the first three days of January alone.  This is a serious push to
>reform Wikipedia as a network of users linked according to beliefs and
>preferences that can be accessed by a point-of-view pusher at the
>touch of a button.
>
>The house is on fire.
>
OK, so I have about 19,000 pages on my watchlist, and review it about
twice a day. The only trend I've noticed since November is a slight
uptick in anons engaging in subtle vandalism instead of the "Joey is
gay" type, and some cases of "stacked" multiple vandalism by different
anons - both worrying trends, since they take longer to analyze. I'm
also seeing vandalism staying in, not for the boasted minutes, but
hours or days, which I'm discovering by reviewing anons' contrib
history further back (many articles are apparently not on any active
watchlist).

I have yet to see any userbox-facilitated trashing of articles.

Stan