Template talk:Userfied

Tone

I really think this template has a rather harsh tone. It certainly doesn't appear to assume good faith, and has as much a feel of a reprimand and a "we don't trust you" as anything I've seen in template space. It's my feeling that most bio pages appear in articlespace because the creators are new and unaware that they have a userspace (easy to tell if the page title and their login name are the same), and would not trouble articlespace with their bios if they knew where to put them. I prefer a much gentler initial approach (there's always time to bring out the guns and knives later). This is the boilerplate I use when I find a bio obviously written by the person it's about: "If you want to include information about yourself on Wikipedia, the best place to do it is on your user page, which can be found [[User:Username here|here]]. Otherwise it will likely be deleted. On your user page, though, you are free to share as much or as little as you want about yourself. Please feel free to contact me on my talk page if you have any questions. ~~~~" Not only does this present the message kindly, it also offers a direct link to their userspace. D e nni ^talk 01:43, 23 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've found that aside from the heavilly used vandalism and welcome ones, nearly all template usertalk messages were just composed by some editor who felt the need for it at some point, and the words weren't exactly labored over. It's more like someone said "I'm tired of typing the same thing, I'll whip up a quick template" rather than "Here is Wikipedia's formal response, set in stone, to everyone who does X". Other editors add things here and there because they want the template to be more useful, as you can see if you look at the history of this one. So clean up the tone please, but I think it should maintain the same underlying information as it does now. --W.marsh 01:52, 23 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

two templates?

This seems to be two completely different warnings mashed into one.

The first warning is a warning about a non-suitable Wikipedia article, where the editor moves the text to a user subpage instead of nominating it for deletion. If moving a page to a user subpage and speaking with the user first is an accepted practice, then it seems that we should split this into a warning that's separate from part two, and that contains links to afd. This warning mentions deletion, but doesn't explain the process and it should, especially if it's a new user who has created the article. I'm not sure that a template is needed for this, but I like it. It seems like a nice alternative to throwing a new user into the deletion process head first.

The second part of the template addresses users having inappropriate information on their talk pages, and it seems to me to be a well written warning. But these two warnings really shouldn't be together on the same template. Opinions? TStein 06:31, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]