Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:The Ministry of Truth/Userboxes/Nat Soc

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 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was Delete per consensus below and also per my rationale at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Gr8opinionater/Userboxes/National Socialism. See also Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Gr8opinionater/Userboxes/Strasserist; Requests for arbitration/Billy Ego-Sandstein. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:40, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

User:The Ministry of Truth/Userboxes/Nat Soc


This was deleted way back as part of a mass cull of politically-motivated userboxes, which were restored after a convincing consensus at this 2006 DRV. The restorer's edit summary was "restored by DRV by strong consensus as part of en masse DRV -- yes, I know what I'm undeleting -- I expect somebody will MfD this, but I worked for the ACLU, so my stomach can take it." The following year deleted it again with edit summary "spray with Nazi-B-Gon".

In considering it, note that the original userbox included a swastika, File:Nazi Swastika.svg, which is not currently shown because it is on the MediaWiki:Bad image list. If the userbox is kept, an exception would be need to be made in the Bad Image List to allow the swastika to be displayed as part of the user box.

Undeletion was requested at WP:REFUND. In view of the DRV consensus I restored, notifying Herostratus, who tagged it as vandalism. I don't think this is vandalism, so I have declined the speedy and bring it here. I personally favour keep on the grounds of WP:NOTCENSORED, but this needs a community view on the balance between that and WP:POLEMIC. JohnCD (talk) 11:14, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Comments

 * Delete. Not a useful page for the project. We are a publishing organization, not a bunch of college students sitting around a bong going "Woahhhhh.... dude, think about this.... you can't prove Hitler was bad, you know? It's just opinion, woahhh...". This page does not help us publish an encyclopedia. I'll expound on my reasons below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Herostratus (talk • contribs) 15:17, 22 April 2016‎ (UTC)
 * Keep. The editor who deleted it seems to not want to engage in a serious discussion on this. I see no moral reasoning that would make this userbox particularly problematic, because userboxes for Stalinism, Mass Execution Fans, Social Darwinists, Facists, Torture Fans, people who believe the US is the leading terrorist force in the world, National Bolshevists etc. also exist. --Laber□T 15:34, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Entirely missing: "Should be kept because its a net positive toward our goal publishing an encyclopedia because _______". Fill in the blank (which I'm betting you can't, or anyway not well). Herostratus (talk) 17:12, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete. My initial sense is that userboxes, quite frankly, usefully reflect the editing biases (and sometimes areas of expertise) of the editor in question. However, no editor actually uses this userbox, so it is useless for either purpose. bd2412  T 17:38, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, because it was deleted. --Laber□T 17:47, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Can you point to instances of users who had it on their pages before it was deleted (and not as a joke)? bd2412  T 19:26, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * No, but it was deleted a long time ago. Also, if you look at the transclusions of many other political userboxes, a lot of people seem to use ones that would seem far to extreme to be actually used, and in a seemingly serious manner. --Laber□T 19:31, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, there was User:Blind14. It didn't stay there long. —Cryptic 19:39, 22 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete because it's an unused userbox. We don't need to keep these around for the academic exercise of "perhaps a Nazi (or just a fan of Nazism) will edit here and want to put a userbox on their page." -- Ricky81682 (talk) 17:49, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep If Nazis are editing Wikipedia (which lets face it they are) I'd much rather they out themselves as Nazis, than go undetected. Brustopher (talk) 22:20, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Except this is currently an unused honeypot. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 04:24, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah and we don't really want nazis here. You can't really be a good nazi and a good editor because you're a sworn enemy of objective truth about race, history, and much else. Also, you're a nasty piece of work who believes in getting your way through brute force, because all nazis are nasty pieces of work by definition, so you probably won't be collegial. Also our tolerating your presence will drive away good editors. Also its a potential embarrasment for the project. So we don't want you. So this userbox could, more usefully and with less trouble for everyone, be replaced with one reading "This user requests to be banned". Herostratus (talk) 19:34, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
 * You may find this ANI thread informative (and downright horrifying when you realise how many of Wikipedia's "Good Articles" on Nazism he claims to have written). Brustopher (talk) 14:53, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. Nazi affiliation of editors is not ok. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:37, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete. The most likely use for this userbox is trolling; it obviously offers no benefits to Wikipedia.  (The suggestion above that it will help us to recognize the bias of Nazi editors willing to self-identify is, I hope, not offered in seriousness.) Frankly, the undeletion of this userbox and the insistence on having this deletion discussion borders on meta-trolling.  JohnCD's misuse of NOTCENSORED and his suggestion that we would need to whitelist a swastika to properly restore the userbox certainly doesn't refute that hypothesis. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:54, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I note that there has still been no (plausible) argument offered which illustrates how this box benefits the project. The only arguments in favor seem to boil down to WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, which is a terrible (and terribly weak) rationale. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:06, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep Since political useboxes are allowed (unlike in some Wikipedias), I don't see why there should be selection on those political views. I know several respected editors with a communist userbox, the ideology which resulted in genocide in Russia, Ukraine, China and Cambodia, so moral issues shouldn't come into play either. --Pudeo' 14:01, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as per WP:USERBOXES. Quoting from the guideline, "Userboxes must not be inflammatory or divisive." This clearly is both, as this discussion shows. ~ RobTalk 23:44, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete, it's a needlessly-divisive polemic. As for the userboxes for "Stalinism, Mass Execution Fans, Social Darwinists, Facists, Torture Fans, people who believe the US is the leading terrorist force in the world, National Bolshevists etc.," then we can certainly consider deleting those too. GABHello! 20:22, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
 * The divisive policy is something I didn't knew, and if I take said policy into account, I may be in favor of deletion. --Laber□T 18:52, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Threaded discussion
Well, User:JohnCD knows perfectly well that the policy WP:NOTCENSORED applies only to articles, so this is the giveaway that he's just trolling. I understand people get bored or tense and need to indulge in an occasional bit of trollery from time to time. Fine, OK, got it. (This is above and beyond the old and generally true observation that even for article space "When an editor invokes WP:NOTCENSORED he's usually up to no good").

As to the merits, don't be silly. There are limits for anything and this page is beyond the limits. We don't allow userboxes to the effect of "This user believes uppity niggers should be lynched"... "This user believes women should be seen and not heard" or just pick whatever you want.

As I said, there's the adolescent postion "Whoaa, nooooo.... you can't set limits, man, because.... get this... like who's gonna set the limits... it's like... whoa, where's my lighter, man..." and so forth. Of course serious adult people set limits all the time based on complicated but sound moral reasoning, which I can't teach here to people who don't have it, and this page is over any reasonable limit and is purely inflammatory. Stop it.

Unless the people involved are actual nazis, in which case they should be in a lot more trouble here than just for some minor trollery. We don't want and cannot have actual nazis here -- nazism is inimical to the very basis of this project, and for every person we allow to proclaim that they are nazis we lose potentially hundreds or thousands of normal people, and so forth. But I'm confident that the only use of this page is for pure trollery. Trouts to User:JohnCD for wasting our time on this.

Also to remind the person closing that this is not a vote. There are many people here who are callow, and many who are up for a bit of fun, and many who are on the spectrum. It doesn't matter. It's not a vote. Article rules such as NOTCENSORED and NPOV and so forth don't apply to how we run our organization internally. We need an argument "This page enhances rather than retards our mission of publishing a great encyclopedia because ____________" that is stronger than the argument "This will be mainly used for trollery, will enrage and drive away decent people, cost us editors, engender endless sterile contention, and bring shame to the project". Unless proponents can come up with a stronger counterargument, the proposal should be closed as delete on strength of argument. It's not a vote. Herostratus (talk) 15:29, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * What is more problematic about a userbox saying that you are a Nazi than about a userbox saying you're a facist, or that you support torture? --Laber□T 17:51, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Well obviously shouldn't have those either. By all means sent those to WP:CSD too, and if bounced from there then send them to WP:MFD. "This user supports torture" is not a userbox we should have. As to your other concerns, I'll address them in a separate section below where we won't interfere with the work of the MfD.

Special section for discussing moral reasoning, if anybody wants to
(Putting this down here to avoid getting this more general topic convoluted with the actual work of this MfD, which is just discussing this this one userbox.)

A user (User:Laberkiste, who very much wants this userbox to exist I gather), wrote ""I see no moral reasoning that would make this userbox particularly problematic" and, like most people would, I responded in a fair but somewhat acerbic manner; User:Laberkiste, being unable to respond, instead deleted my text, which is generally frowned upon, but which I'm not suprised. But out of deference to this person's sensibilities I'll put it here in a separate section. What I wrote was:
 * "I see no moral reasoning that would make this userbox particularly problematic" tells us something about the person saying it, but doesn't really bear on the issue. It is helpful when the person openly admits this, though, so we don't have to spend further effort considering his arguments.


 * And there's not anything shameful about not having fully developed moral reasoning, if the person is young -- moral reasoning requires subtlety of mind which is the last part of the brain to develop, in one's late twenties (look it up) and it takes time to get it set up. There's not necessarily anything shameful about it if the person is just wired differently (although the person should then maybe self-examine to determine if this is true, and then consider relying heavily on external cues). But these sort of questions are, and need to be, discussions among people who do have moral sense, otherwise we can't arrive at conclusions that will befit the project moving forward.

All that's accurate and I stand by it... It'd be possible to make the case "This is morally abhorrent, but I guess we should put up with because [some reason]". But that's not what the user said. He said it's just fine, so I think "There's not necessarily anything shameful about [saying that]" is being quite generous, since there actually is something shameful about it, to be honest.

Anyway, the user's full argument was "I see no moral reasoning that would make this userbox particularly problematic, because userboxes for Stalinism, Mass Execution Fans, Social Darwinists, Facists, Torture Fans, people who believe the US is the leading terrorist force in the world, National Bolshevists etc. also exist"

To which the counter is threefold:
 * 1) Well some of those shouldn't exist either.
 * 2) And if you're making the argument that any userbox should be permitted, that's silly, and you've already lost -- we have banned and will ban many userpage statements here. The Wikipedia is not a suicide pact.
 * 3) And so there are limits to things. Finding the limits takes moral reasoning, which is hard, and requires subtlety and acuity of mind. Even then, there seldom is a black-and-white cutoff point. Some userboxe are maybe marginally OK, others not. You have to use your wits to find the best solution to these questions. You have to take in account various complicated, shifting, and difficult-to-know factors such as current mores and so forth. However, for your pretest on Moral Reasoning 101, "Is being a nazi permitted in polite society", the answer is "No", and it is certainly possible to explain why, but tedious and time-consuming, and I'll be willing to (try to) explain why, if the user will engage instead of also deleting this. Herostratus (talk) 20:47, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Okay, so you are saying that there may be some political userboxes that one could consider disruptive. So far, my line of thought was basically that userboxes are kept no matter how extreme the content, and that this Nazi Box was "disposed" because people wanted to "hide" the drawbacks of said policy. If deletion of political userboxes is justified if they are considered too disruptive, then we could delete this box; however, I still think the reason for deletion was not well formulated, and it should have been discussed beforehand. --Laber□T 22:10, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Alright. I get it. We understand each other better now. Obviously nazzism is a contentious subject, so I apologize on my part for being overly acerbic.


 * Right, the question of what limits if any should be place on user's own pages comes up. And no doubt there's some people who believe that there shouldn't be any limits, probably on free speech grounds I guess.


 * So leaving aside the moral questions, and just going on a practical basis (they are intertwined to some degree, but deciding what's practical is easier), this is veryt small minority position. We are publishing company, and free speech simply does not apppply, either to our articles and especially not to our internal workings. We are not a goverment so we are not bound by the First Amendment.


 * Maybe think of it like this: the Wikipedia is an "office", and our user pages are like our "cubicles". The user pages belong to the project not to use individually. So... what would be OK stuff to hang in your cubicle? Some offices are pretty strict about this, but most aren't, especially in high tech, and this is sort of a high tech organization, culturally.


 * So fine, you have Star Trek posters, and I Love Golden Retrievers, and "Vote For Chtulu: Why Choose The Lesser Evil?" and really a very wide range. A cross or Buddhist symbol and like that. Lots of stuff. Political stuff, well, not so much.... it depends on what it is, how prominently its displayed, and whether anyone complains. A little GOP elephant statue or whatever you will probably get away with. A swastika, not so much. Not so much because its just going to introduce sterile contention. Its going to make your Jewish colleagues (and really all your decent-minded colleagues) harder to work with. And if they complain (and they will) and nothing is done, they will quit, and then you've lost good employees. And for what -- to cater to a nazi (unless hes just a troll)? If your're publishing an encyclopedia, how good an employee is a nazi (who by definition is a sworn enemy of enlightenment values such as objective truth about race, history, and much else) going to be? It's objectively destructive to the organization.


 * So we don't allow it. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Anything that detracts from this we don't want.


 * On the morality side, its' harder, and one reason its harder is because people like to play "there is no such thing as morality, its all just a construct" here (even though in their real lives few live by that, and a good thing too). But there is such a thing as morality, but proving it through moral philosophy exercises is difficult and actually above my pay grade. However, consider that displaying this userbox will cause people justified emotional distress, for no commensurate gain. Causing people justified emotional distress for no commensurate gain is basically part of the dictionary definition of "evil", and evil is bad. Herostratus (talk) 18:44, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.