Talk:User icons

The page should highlight somewhere that this is a highly controversial proposal. For instance, it.wiki discussed it many times in the last few years and it was always rejected. I'm sure other wikis had the same discussions with identical result. --Nemo 16:48, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Lots of things are controversial on one wiki and less controversial on others, so I wouldn't assume it's universally controversial. While I agree with you that it's important to note if some communities have discussed features in the past, Wikimedia features engineering is working quite a bit that could be considered controversial in some way, so it's not like this document is dramatically more or less controversial than say, the idea of using avatars in Flow. To be totally honest, whether something is controversial among Wikipedians has little to do with whether it's a potentially beneficial addition from a user experience design perspective. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   19:54, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually this may be considered worse than avatars because it can give false ideas on the social structure of the wikis. Anyway, I'm just assuming that when considering something you'll incorporate past experiences and discussions in your considerations; otherwise you'll waste the precious resource which our wikis' history is, only to repeat the same patterns over and over. --Nemo 22:16, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Alternative to "experienced editor" icon
As an example, the whole "experienced editor" icon proposal doesn't have any concrete use-case, but it's easy to find better ideas by looking at our wikis' history. A valid use-case is "As a user, I want to easily find an administrator to contact directly when I need one for an administrative action". Well, our wikis (and in particular Commons I think, but also e.g. zh.wiki) have used for years Toolserver tools like ActiveUsers (now broken) and more recently stewardry. Integrating in core (maybe even in Special:ListAdmins) such a feature, allowing users to immediately find an online/active sysop/whatever, would surely be (more) useful. Don't ignore the past disussions and the years of experience of the communities of people working daily on our projects, you won't find in individual minds any better resource than this collective wisdom. --Nemo 08:35, 21 December 2012 (UTC)