User:Misza13/Userbox Gallery Poll

The events regarding userboxes that have taken place since the beginning of 2006 have proven the current policies regarding them ineffective. An attempt at healing the situation by introduction of "CSD T1" has made the situation even worse, as it came out to be vague and often misapplied. While it may only be a feeling shared only by a part of the community, the sole fact of Wikipedians being torn by such a small issue and wasting their time on various (often pointless) debates renders the current situation regarding userboxes [...] unacceptable.

The most common arguments claimed against userboxes that this policy attempts to solve are:
 * 1) Vote-stacking mechanism via the Special:Whatlinkshere feature, which (the mechanism) is widely considered harmful.
 * 2) Inappropriate use of the Template: namespace, i.e. for purposes that do not further the cause of the Project, which is to write and give away a free encyclopedia.

Problems with userboxes being "divisive" or "inflammatory" cannot be solved by a userbox-oriented policy, since anyone can put any HTML code on their userpage, so such cases must be solved by individual per-user disputes.

The policy

 * 1) Political/religious/unencyclopedic userboxes are considered harmful (or at best useless). Thus, all userboxes which do not meet the criteria under 2. below must cease to exist within the Template: namespace (read: be deleted, perhaps under a new-established CSD).
 * 2) The following userbox types are allowed to stay as templates:
 * 3) Babel language templates.
 * 4) Membership userboxes for WikiProject and Wikipedian organizations.
 * 5) Userboxes expressing interests/hobbies/fields of expertise.
 * 6) Other userboxes are still permitted on user pages but only
 * 7) as raw HTML/WikiSyntax code,
 * 8) by the use of the    template,
 * 9) by inclusion of a user's own subpage (inclusion of userbox subpages of other users' is not allowed as it would permit factionalism through Special:Whatlinkshere).
 * 10) To aid the less creative/technically inclined Wikipedians in browsing and creating their own userboxes by learning, a central repository will be created and maintaned at Userbox Gallery (shortcut WP:UG). It will be similar to the current Userboxes and it's subpages. The userboxes therein will be stored as raw HTML code or the  templates along with with their code being shown, so that adding userboxes to one's page will still be as easy as Copy/Paste.
 * Note: This is probably unneeded as Userboxes may as well be reformed to accomplish this task. Thus, this point may need to be rewritten. That is also the reason why the page's name may change as well soon.

Subst or not
One thing in the policy warrants a separate poll. While the users will decide on themselves whether they prefer or, the Gallery should be uniform in this regard. There are two choices here. Either they are presented as templates or as raw HTML/WikiSyntax code. The first option is probably better as it reduces clutter, but to implement it all current templates would have to literally be unsubsted. Writing a parser for that might be tricky as some have been pathologically altered from their original userbox-inherited form and doing it by hand may be tedious.

Alternative and previous proposals

 * Unacceptable userspace material (inactive / historic)
 * Proposed template and category usage policy (failed to achieve consensus)
 * Mackensen's Proposal (failed to achieve consensus)
 * TheTrueSora's UBX Proposal (inactive / historic)
 * Userbox policy (inactive / historic)
 * Userbox policy poll (failed to achieve consensus)
 * Userfying userboxes (failed to achieve consensus)
 * Proposed policy on userboxes (failed to achieve consensus)