Userbox

A userbox is a box in a person's user profile on Wikipedia. The term may be in use in other internet societies as well.

A user box was used to determine who someone was, or at least what someone was. You could be British, Asian, speak 4 languages, be good at C programming, like maths, and so forth.

In essence, a user box demonstrated what a person's biases were. They also made Wikipedia seem like fun, and helped to make a person's user page look like their personal profile.

This concept was disliked by many people on Wikipedia for many reasons and in early 2006 Kelly Martin along with many others decided to delete many user boxes, which resulted in other administrators disagreeing and undeleting them, what is called a wheel war.

Problems with User boxes

• NPOV - User boxes expose the impossibility of a neutral point of view by exposing what a person's biases were. If someone had a user box saying their political affiliation then edited a political article, they were biased.
• Made it look like fun - Wikipedia isn't meant to be fun, it is meant to be serious.
• A personal web page rather than a public page - User boxes made it sound like it was your personal web page that you owned, while in reality it was all owned by Wikipedia and was for public consumption.

Good things about User boxes

Basically the same as above, but seen as good.

Results of the dispute

The user boxes that were deleted remained deleted, although some were recreated. Kelly Martin and others involved were scolded as they should have discussed it first, but were told that in essence what they did was right.

Nonetheless, Kelly Martin and everyone else involved became much less popular, as very few people liked to have user boxes deleted, which messed up their user pages.