[WikiEN-l] userbox : insanity ?

Tue Jan 10 05:31:59 UTC 2006

Both of these are issues which can be dealt with independently from
the userbox question.

1. Should fair use images be allowed on user pages? Most people on
here seem to conclude "no" on this subject in general, and it's the
current policy, so that seems fairly straightforward.

2. Should user categories be allowed in general? I don't personally
have a strong opinion on this (I don't see the problem, personally --
if people are going to bloc vote, assuming that is the issue, they
have no problem doing that as it is. All one has to do to find
sympathetic editors to a given POV is to look at the edit histories of
contentious articles.) but surely a decision can be reached.

3. Should templates on user pages which are purely for decoration be
auto-substituted? If there's an argument to be made about server
performance, then okay, this should also be fairly straightforward.

Taking care of these issues as *general* issues and not related to one
specific fad is the way to extinguish whatever actual problems there
are without being idiosyncratic and draconian about it.

FF

On 1/8/06, Carbonite <carbonite.wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/8/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Why is it that I agree with Sam Spade? Honestly, I still do not see
> > what all the fuss is about. Let people play with their silly trinkets.
> > They will tire of them and make new trinkets later. All you do in
> > heaping so much attention on one particular trinket is guarantee its
> > prolonged existence.
>
> Then we should make userboxes nothing more than silly trinkets. They
> should be snippets of code that someone adds to their user page and
> nothing more. Just a few simple ground rules: No fair use images and
> no user categories. I think that the opposition would pretty much
> disappear if userboxes truly were nothing more than a box with some
> text.
>
> Carbonite
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>