This user is constantly on their mobile phone

An ode to Wikipedia userboxes.

I’ve been off this past week because I was at my graduation! My accomplishments include being, to the best of my knowledge, the first person to get the word “Freakbob” printed in the Columbia Daily Spectator. This week, I’m back to my regular cadence. I have lots planned for PHONE TIME this summer. Thank you to everyone who’s been reading so far.

I'm wearing a very special Columbia Daily Spectator stole.

In case you missed it, yesterday I published my interview with Christie George, who created an “illustrated book report” of Jenny Odell’s 2019 book “How to Do Nothing,” a project that ultimately became much more.

'The Emergency Was Curiosity': Christie George on attention, creative practice, and useless projects

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Many userboxes (like the one in the bottom right corner) provide meta-commentary on the feature itself.

This evening I went down a Wikipedia userbox rabbit hole and collected a few of my favorites for the newsletter. As the Wikipedia page for them describes, a userbox “is a small colored box designed to appear only on a Wikipedian’s user page as a communicative notice about the user, in order to directly or indirectly help Wikipedians collaborate more effectively on articles.”

Userboxes can range from the simple—providing information like age, nationality, location, occupation, or pronouns—to the increasingly niche, referential, and wacky.

In a chapter from the 2009 book “Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World,” William Westerman writes about the history and culture of userboxes: “A fair number of these are self-referential, or even metafolkloristic, in the sense that they make use of in-jokes that would only be comprehensible to aficionados of the same television series, adherents to a particular religion, or experienced Wikipedians.”

Here are a few of my favorite userbox finds:

“And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you,” wrote Lev Grossman in 2006.

Depends on the day.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you probably know which category I fall into.

This page has all your mobile phone service userbox needs—Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, you name it.

There are userboxes related to social media platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitch, Twitter, and X. No Substack (yet?).

Quick links

• Userbox templates about the Internet

• Userbox templates about mobile phone service

• Userbox templates about coffee

  

  I want that Wikimedia Commons coffee cup.

• Userbox templates about the arts

• Userbox templates about desserts

Besides Peeps, other desserts with dedicated userboxes include Swedish Fish, red velvet cake, and Krispy Kreme donuts.