In a community of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, with extremely diverse and often opposite views, it is inevitable that there will be certain issues that get people agitated. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before something came along and caused chaos here at Wikipedia. Was it going to be a policy issue? Some large section of the community suddenly deciding that NPOV wasn't working? Or would it be a content dispute? Someone decides to list for deletion every article about fictional characters, and suddenly AfD discussions are running to tens of thousands of words? Or might it have been an Arbitration Committee ruling that large numbers of people disagreed with? A ruling against Jimbo perhaps?
As it turned out, no. The issue that seems to have got everyone so excited recently is userboxes. Yes, small boxes on User pages, that originally came about as offspring of the long-used Babel language-proficiency boxes.
And boy was it a big dispute:
- After the interventions of Kelly Martin to delete some of the userboxes that she felt were particularly inappropriate, a Request for Comment was put up against her. Whilst I have not seem every RfC ever created, it would seem likely it was the longest ever, and will likely hold this record for a very long time. To put it into persepective, I copied it all into Microsoft Word. It is 95 pages long (Times New Roman, size 12 font), and has approaching 38,000 words
- The attempts at a policy for userboxes is somewhat understatedly said on the page itself to be highly controversial. There are, as far as I know, no other policies that have this written at the top of them. The talk page for it is a hive of activity, the older discussions are even longer, and the poll on certain aspects of the policy has well over 150 votes at the time of writing
- In terms of "judicial" attention, the issue came to a head with this Arbitration Committee case. The case was one of the longest and most complex in ArbCom history, and has 13 members of the Committee voting in the end, which is if not unprecedented then at the very least unusual. Interestingly, a direct Request for Arbitration against Kelly Martin was rejected by the ArbCom
In the end, Jimbo decided to step in, and as if from on high decreed that:
"Userboxes of a political or, more broadly, polemical, nature are bad for the project. They are attractive to the wrong kinds of people, and they give visitors the wrong idea of what it means to be a Wikipedian".
So what are my opinions? I suppose they are five-fold:
- Userboxes are often only continuations of what has always been part of User pages: opinions. Pretty much everyone has some POV statement on their User page. And that is fine. A User page is your own space, to disclose what information you want, with only a few caveats (such as no blogging, and no non-free images). Hence, userboxes are in a sense nothing new
- One of the foundational policies of Wikipedia is no personal attacks, and this must also apply to User pages. Therefore, userboxes that are directly offensive to other people should be deleted as if they were attack pages. This does not include opinions that people might find offensive
- Wikipedia is not a soapbox, and as such, bearing in mind what I said above in my first point, whilst telling the world that you are pro-whatever should be allowed, Political and small-p political userboxes should be strongly discouraged
- Censorship is usually a bad thing, and censorship of User pages is almost never a good thing (with all the above qualifications)
- Userboxes are silly, and as such I have none on my User page
In a nutshell, userboxes just are not a very big issue, and whilst I do not want them, who cares if other people have them?!