User:TheTrueSora/A Proposal on Userboxes (revisited)

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This essay has been turned into a proposal, which can be found at Wikipedia:TheTrueSora's UBX Proposal. Please comment on the proposal there. This page is left for historical value. // The True Sora 01:25, 20 May 2006 (UTC)



This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

Recently, much ado has been made over userboxes, where they belong, and if Wikipedia should allow them in a general area. Many polls have been made, but all have ended without consensus. Some have been for keeping most of the userboxes, while others have been for substing the userboxes onto user page. Still others have been for the entire deletion of the userboxes. Here I will list a new proposal, this time more moderate, in an attempt to finally solve this issue.

Contents

[edit] On Where to Keep Userboxes

My first concern is on what namespace userboxes ashould be kept. While the User: namespace doesn't have to be NPOV, the Template: one should; after all, the Communism and cleanup templates should not, in my opinion, be kept in the same namespace as those expressing belief in pro-life legislation and the Flying Spagetti Monster.

However, removing these templates by deleting them raises cries of censorship, while substing them causes tons of clutter in a user page.

Therefore, I propose that all userboxes, including Babel, humor, controversial beliefs, etc., will be placed in a new namespace, the Userbox: namespace. In this way, they are removed from the Template: namespace (which will be left with Wikiepdia-related templates), and those possibly non-NPOV templates are placed on a namespace which users know won't be NPOV. Therefore, the problem of NPOV on the Template: namespace is solved. The only problem with this is currently using {{Userbox:en-N}} does not work; however, I know it is feasible, as it is possible to do {{User:TheTrueSora/en-n}}, as I have done on my userpage.

As for the actual programming involved to work with the Userbox: namespace, the MediaWiki software is open source; if the developers have no interest, I would, with support of the community, be willing to make the code necessary to create this namespace.

[edit] On Categories

Mackensen proposed the deletion of categories that are not directly related to Wikipedia interests. However, I don't agree with this. Some users have claimed that creating seperate categories for different ideals makes break our unity; I think it helps us build a better encyclopedia. Users in the Atheist Wikipedians category will be known for being atheist; in the same way, they can form a community with other Wikipedians who are Atheists. If, then, they would like to make an edit to Atheism, but are unsure if their information is legitimate for the article, they can ask someone in the atheist category. By deleting categories that are non-NPOV, a sense of the Wikipedian community is lost- categories form communities, and these communities are destroyed by the deletion of POV categories.

[edit] On T2

With the above proposal, T2 becomes unnecessaary, as the Template: namespace no longer contains userboxes.

[edit] In Conclusion

It is my firm hope that this essay will eventually be formed into a true proposal to be voted on. Please discuss in the talk page ways to implement the proposal. Also, this has not yet been added to the Wikipedia: namespace as a proposal; if I can garner enough support, it hopefully will be.

[edit] Alternative and previous proposals