User:Improv/GUS considered harmful

The Userbox debates, in which the debate about divisive and inflammatory userboxes that were cropping up all over Wikipedia was concluded, was a compromise that didn't actually solve the userbox problem and did little but inconvenience users with userboxes. It is an unfortunate solution that's worse than simply allowing either side to win.

Around the end of 2005, userboxes became a growing phonomenon. Initially created for project babel for users to indicate their familiarity with different languages, for the purpose of translation, people began to use them to express their preferences in music, political ideas, ideas about sexuality, and a number of other purposes. A number of administrators, myself included, saw this as a growing problem - userpages began to be full of the things, and many of the expressed opinions were highly divisive and led to a breakdown in the ability for users to work together, as instead of being users, we all became visibly gay, republican, anti-turkish, believers that our race is favoured by various gods, and similar. The community also suffered indirectly as people began to think that the purpose of their userpage was to express themselves in as many ways as they could, partly transforming wikipedia userpages into personal homepages. A number of new users came to expect these things, and began to further assert that they had a right to put anything they wanted on their userpages. This represented a significant shift from the earlier days of Wikipedia, where userpages were expected to fit within the scope of the project, with only moderate reign being given to other content. A growing sense that this was a problem spread through concerned parts of the community, although along with the concern was the awareness that fixing the problem would be unpopular because of a large number of new users who had come to the project without a good understanding of our goals and policies, demanding for themselves as many privileges as possible. After considerable discussion and some sporadic action by some admins, Jimbo gave a vaguely worded suggestion that userboxes were becoming a problem. After more community paralysis, eventually a new CSD was added, bypassing normal deletion procedure (to avoid the issues with consensus) and allowing for the deletion of userboxes that were divisive or inflammatory. Some admins, most notably Tony Sidaway, Kelly Martin, and myself took the opportunity to begin to rid the project of the userboxes (which were all in template space at the time). As expected, the community was divided, with most long-term admins understanding the policy/project goal issues at stake and supporting the purge, and most non-long-term users deeply opposed and embittered. Kelly Martin, because of her brusque manner, bore the brunt of community anger over the actions, with Tony Sidaway and myself, being progressively more polite, bore less ill will for the purges. As the admin community was at least partly divided and Jimbo failed to continue to support the policy change he declared, the purges were by-and-large wheel warred and reverted. Eventually, a seeming solution was reached, the German Userbox Solution.

The German Userbox Solution, named as such because it was modeled after what the German Wikipedia (a healthier community than the English community, now the source of several policy ideas), suggested that userboxes were inappropriate for inclusion in the main template space, being an expression of user ideas. It concluded that userboxes should be moved into userspace -- subpages of userpages can be included as templates with the correct markup syntax. This would presumably make userboxes non-project issues as they would be considered like any other userpage content, and they additionally would be somewhat harder for users to use because of the syntax issues. As a result, most userboxes were scooted into subpages of various userpages or subst'd where they occurred. Unfortunately, this only adressed the smallest of concerns for userboxes -- it kept the most problematic aspects, merely sweeping them under a new rug. Userboxes still exist, they are still divisive, and they're still hurting the community. They are just as easy to find -- visiting another user's page with a userbox one wants is just as easy as looking at centralised indices, it's merely somewhat uglier of a syntax to cut and paste. The problem of users misunderstanding the purpose of Wikipedia userpages (and Wikipedia in general) continues to grow on our project, and Jimbo's failure to follow through with his decisions or support those who followed them and did what was right for the project led Kelly Martin (primarily) and Tony Sidaway to become scapegoats in a way they've never recovered, and prevented them from serving on the Arbitration committee (elections were unfortunately right after the userbox mess came to the GUS "solution", and the masses remembered Tony and Kelly's actions. The userbox problem is still present, people who worked to fix the threat to the project and the community were abandoned because of Jimbo's inability to follow up on his stand, and things are just a bit more inconvenient for userbox users - this represents a failure on all counts.