[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures

Mon Jun 5 18:47:45 UTC 2006

People should be allowed and encourage to develop their personal
identity on Wikipedia, so long as they are also working on the
encyclopedia.

Wikipedia survives because editors feel loyalty to it, because they
keep coming back, because they invest in it psychologically. This
should be encouraged.

It is only at the level when such activities really start to interfere
with the activities of others that we should be arrogant enough to
step in.

If the sigs interfere with editing, posting, discussing, etc., then we
should encourage the users to change them and, if they are a serious
disruption (and many people agree to this), perhaps change them
forcibly after a few polite times asking them to change them.

Otherwise we should leave well enough alone. The entire userbox debate
ended up being a pointless waste of time and human resources. In the
end very little positive was accomplished by it. A number of good
editors were antagonized on both sides of it.  Let's try and actively
avoid things like this in the future. It is perhaps even more
detrimental to the encyclopedia to argue pointlessly over what end up
essentially being aesthetic judgments.

I could care less if someone has a cute signature, as long as it
doesn't actually get in the way of my editing. It is not my job to
enforce aesthetic judgments.

FF

On 6/5/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/5/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> >
> > When you see someone with a big, fancy, "cutesie" signature,
> > it is obvious that (a) they spent a lot of time on it, and
> > (b) it is very personal to them, it is part of their identity.
>
> Yes, of course.  This isn't something to be encouraged.
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