Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:UBX/Alt-right pepe

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

User:UBX/Alt-right pepe[edit]

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]

  • Delete This serves no purpose on Wikipedia. Alternative outlets apply or just don't support that. Legacypac (talk) 04:36, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I was just trying to make a userbox for politics section. Alt-right is just another political belief that some people may have. I see a pro-Democrat userbox and they were the ones who made the KKK in the first place, can we remove that as well then? Shadowzpaev (talk) 05:26, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's a good example of a shambolic, simplistic interpretation of cause and effect. No, the Democrats did not 'create' the KKK in the sense you are suggesting. Idiotic splinter and fringe groups have been created from political/religious/economic ideologies since time immemorial. This does not legitimise the promotion of the existence of such groups. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 05:48, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete - Aside from being WP:FRINGE, divisive and inflammatory, it doesn't actually mean anything (as a political position) supported by reliable sources. There are umpteen dozen definitions as to what the concept embraces (all offensive), with no standard political principles, only fear and simplistic 'solutions' to simplistic understandings of purported 'problems'. Not suitable for an NPOV tertiary source: most certainly not userboxes. --Iryna Harpy (talk) 05:41, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per current userboxes practice. Doesn't really stand out from other extreme position userboxes like communist, fascist or anarchist ones. Ping me if there's a RfC on political userboxes with a larger scope. --Pudeo (talk) 12:18, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Keep, I guess. This seems well within what we typically allow for userboxes. You don't have to like the alt-right or even think it's a meaningful term (though we do have an article about it). FRINGE doesn't apply to user pages. I come across userboxes I find [somewhere between distasteful and repugnant] on a regular basis. I don't know why anyone would use them, as they tend to come up when making a case for a topic ban, but people seem to like them. We have userboxes that advocate many particular social and/or political perspectives (one topic that comes to mind is the wide array userboxes against same-sex marriage) -- this one is a much more vague quasi ideological grouping. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 13:44, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agreed, a lot of them seem pretty childish. And if someone wants to identify himself as alt-right, Stalinist or a Neo-Fascist, is that really a bad thing? Pretty good for others to see it openly. --Pudeo (talk) 16:50, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete as it hinders our task of building an encylcopedia. Amisom (talk) 13:48, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I see no frog here. Therefore we can't examine the frog for limb deformities due to pollution, including pollution of intellectual discourse by the alt-right:
  • Delete anyway. I see no frog here. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:26, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Move to User:UBX/Alt-right and Keep per Pudeo and Rhododendrites. @Robert McClenon: The frog image was not really related and was also a copyright violation (being used in that way). An appropriate image could be added in the future. The color could also be adjusted if necessary. That aside, popularity and opinion should not dictate whether a userbox is allowed for one party over another. All are acceptable or none are. Furthermore, User:UBX/Alt-right foe and User:The Ministry of Truth/Userboxes/Fascist exist. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 21:27, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - That sounds like WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Maybe we need WP:DELETEOTHERSTUFF. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:08, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Individual nominations here are not the answer; political userboxes should be handled as a class. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 00:31, 5 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment "All [are] acceptable or none are" is a frankly disturbing example of false equivalence. Describing the problem of endorsing a group of "white supremacists, neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and other far-right fringe hate groups" as being about "popularity" is completely and totally missing the point. Wikipedia can and does draw lines, and this is an encyclopedia, not a social networking site. Using memes and "irony" to justify advocating specific, targeted hatred towards minorities is not compatible with Wikipedia's goals. White supremacists can, and do, edit Wikipedia, but they should not be allowed to mislead others into thinking their ideologies are accepted here. Grayfell (talk) 22:27, 4 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Having a userbox that says "User:Y believes in X ideology" does not mean "Wikipedia [or anyone else] endorses X ideology". I also agree with Pudeo's comments about self-identification of radical views above. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 00:21, 5 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]
  • Comment It will be easier to keep an eye on extreme editors since we can check the transclusions of this userbox and then check the edit history of those using it to better filter out extremist vandalism. However, some exteremists might eventually figure that out. (But it's not like extremists are particularly bright...) Having Communist userboxes makes it easier to check on all kinds of historical revisionism (like downplaying Soviet famines), and this makes it easier to confirm suspicions of a very biased editor. Plus its easier to check on any major edits made by the users with this userbox (or any extreme userbox) than it is to put every single article related to politics and history on your watchlist. I despise the alt-right, and I don't like the idea of putting them on the political spectrum by giving them a userbox; but if anyone uses this userbox it would certainly be easier to monitor them.--PlanespotterA320 (talk) 01:20, 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]
  • Keep. I would not want to wear it, but it does not fail WP:UBCR, imho, it is not uncivil. Read the user page guideline WP:UPYES - "usually one's user page has something about oneself", and indeed "Editors tend to distrust concealed conflicts of interest and agendas. Openly disclosing such interests gains respect". Like it or lump it. Or change WP policy to explicitly ban disclosing political positions. Same as Pudeo, ping me too if there's a RfC with a larger scope. Batternut (talk) 09:01, 7 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]
  • Comment - As a bizarre coincidence, after following vandalism at Talk:White pride, I noticed that the user who created this infobox was a sock puppet, per Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Igor1383. This reinforces my opinion that the Pepe-meme infobox would be mainly used for disruptive trolling instead of sincere collaboration. Grayfell (talk) 23:39, 7 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Grayfell: I assumed it was an older case, but as this is fresh, it does not apply. I still do not approve, however, so switching to Delete. If someone else creates this who is not actively misbehaving, we can cross this bridge again then. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 04:47, 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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