[WikiEN-l] The userbox fad

Thu Jan 5 13:51:43 UTC 2006

On 1/4/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Kelly informs me that a large amount of the apparent growth in
December can be accounted for by cut-and-paste moves of userbox
templates as they were renamed.  Apparently the userbox people were
unaware of the fact that a moved template gets a redirect, thus
preserving the user pages including it.

Maybe things aren't so catastrophic after all.

On the downside, it seems that we do have a number of rather ignorant
editors messing about in template space.