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 . ♠PMC♠ (talk) 03:33, 12 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:UBX/Alt-right pepe

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User:UBX/Alt-right pepe (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

Fails WP:UBCR. The alt-right is a "grouping of white supremacists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and other far-right fringe hate groups" , so this userbox is inflammatory and divisive.

The userbox also previously included File:Feels good man.jpg, which I removed as a copyright issue. Grayfell (talk) 03:58, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Not every unpopular position needs to be treated exactly the same, and it is okay to take a stand against some things, even in the name of free speech. There is nothing dubious about opposing hate groups, and not every judgement call is a slippery slope. We're not even discussing banning these editors or anything like that, we are discussing whether or not they are allow to walk into our community workshop and use our equipment to sew swastika armbands to hand out to other users. Telling them "no, please don't wear that here" is not a challenge to "the least popular speech", it's just basic civility. Grayfell (talk) 00:35, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds good in theory, but does this actually happen? That is not a rhetorical question, I would like to know if anyone is doing this, and how. Is there some way to add transclusions to a watchlist?
If so, is it more practical to patrol a userbox than a set of pages? Humoring extremists has a real cost in terms of the tone set, time wasted, and the editors who are driven away by all that. Keeping this infobox around for hypothetical or tactical reasons seems like a mistake.
The example given was the fascism box. Looking at Special:WhatLinksHere/User:The_Ministry_of_Truth/Userboxes/Fascist, I found a single account which has been active in the last year. A couple which use 1488 and could easily be blocked for username violations (if they were active), and most of the rest were so messy and contradictory they were clearly just taking the piss ("this user is an atheist" "this user is a Christian" "this user is a Marxist" "this user is a fascist"). They might just be sock accounts or even spam bots or something, but since we would need to go off of behavioral evidence anyway, this userbox tells us nothing we didn't already know. The more of these userboxes we have, the less information they provide, and the more welcoming we appear to disruptive extremist editors looking for a platform for advocacy. Grayfell (talk) 01:51, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Transclusions have to be checked manually, but its easier to look after few userboxes than keeping 10,000+ political pages on your watchlist (Literally everything related to Nazi Germany, Soviet famines, lynchings, the US civil war, etc) When I checked the transclusions of a different extreme userbox just now I didn't find any active editors, but I did find a couple surprising username violations including username "Hatekindler". To avoid encouraging extremism, we could just not have it on the userboxes list (as an "orphaned" template) and maybe someone could write a bot automatically "ping" an admin whenever it gets added to a userpage. I'm on the side of deleting it, but felt it would be worth noting that the transclusions can be monitored to block vandals.--PlanespotterA320 (talk) 12:54, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There is a big difference between espousing a "political position" as some abstract thing, and identifying with the a loose collection of hate groups which is the alt-right. Think about the actual beliefs of the alt-right according to sources. White supremacy is uncivil to non-white people, to put it mildly. It is a mistake to compare the alt-right to a political party, or even a single discrete political position like fascism. As alt-right explains, this isn't a position at all, it's a vague grouping of fringe hate movements. Grayfell (talk) 23:00, 7 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Distinguishing between supporting the alt-right, a "loose collection of hate groups", and fascism, a "discrete political position", and conclude that the one is uncivil but the other is not because they may have rigorously thought out whom to gas, is frankly an absurd distinction. IMHO. Batternut (talk) 19:30, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that's a fair point. If you want to nominate any of these other infoboxes for deletion, I would support that. We're not talking about those, here, however, and Wikipedia has a terrible track record for dealing with things in the general case. In this specific case, this infobox is one of several that are associated with violent hate movements. Wikipedia works on consensus more than precedent, but if deleting this somehow created a precedent, that's fine by me. Grayfell (talk) 20:33, 8 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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.


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