[WikiEN-l] Userbox reframing?

Tue Jan 10 15:12:27 UTC 2006

Both sides seem to be treating the userbox conflict as some sort of
law-enforcement issue. It's either something like: "We need to show those
darn n00bs that they can't get away with this!" Or something like: "We
need to show those renegade admins that they can't get away with this!"

(Caricaturing slightly, of course.)

But it seems to me like this is better treated as an *educational* issue.
We need to calmly and carefully explain how some things, if you put them
on your userpage, make you look stupid. And - much more importantly - how
they make the project look stupid.

When people new to the project come upon userpages full of neat
standardized boxes expressing all sorts of opinions they don't think:
"Aha, these users have gone out of their way to make pretty userpages."
The impression given is rather: "The Wikipedia project provides users with
a built-in mechanism to express standardized sound-bite views about a
bunch of topics."

This is not the impression I think we want to give. I'm all for people
expressing their opinions and points of view creatively on their userpages
(sure, why not, I like reading userpages and it's often helpful to know
where people are coming from). But when it looks like the Wikimedia
foundation is encouraging people to hold over-simplified views on
complicated issues like, say, EU-enlargement, then that is not such a good
thing.

Thoughts?

Haukur