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| + | {{Q|Because to win in the game of football, or life, you have to annihilate errything in your path... in a blind rage.|BJ Smith}} |
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| − | <center><font color="red" size="16pt">INACTIVE</font></center> |
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| + | Former bureaucrat from 2011-2014. |
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| + | Semi-retired. |
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| + | I never really had the knowledge of the GTA series to be a great content editor. I played and loved Vice City and San Andreas, and most of my best edits were to VC and SA related pages. I didn't care for GTA3, probably because I started with Vice City and compared to it, GTA3 seemed really primitive with the small car selection, simple missions and silent protagonist. I hated the bleak angsty aesthetic and the driving physics of GTA4, and never played GTAs 1 and 2. |
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| + | I got the job because the wiki was rebuilding in the wake of the [[GTA Wiki:Community split|community split]]. A guy named WikisEditor somehow knew about my work as a bureaucrat on Bully Wiki and invited me (and my fellow bureaucrat Messi1983) to GTA Wiki not because of my content writing but because of my administrative knowledge. We put the wiki back together, got rules written and a fully functional staff promoted and trained. |
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| + | And with that done, there wasn't much for me to do. |
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| + | Every so often something requiring bureaucratish knowledge would happen, like the Dodo/Sasquatch dispute or the January 2014 Administrator Elections. But aside from the occasional Big Thing, all I was doing on GTA Wiki was occasionally reverting vandalism or blocking someone, and enforcing the image policy. And enforcing the image policy is tedious, takes a lot of time, and makes you unpopular with editors who don't see the point. |
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| + | When GTAV came out at first I thought it was awesome. Then I suddenly lost all interest in it. I think it was in the lead-up to a heist where you have to store a getaway vehicle... I don't know. I found that so annoying that I just stopped playing and never started again. And when I realized that GTAV wasn't as great as I thought it was, I began to think it was time for me to leave the wiki. |
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| + | Funny thing is, it's hard to let go if only because it's human nature to hang onto power, even if it's a power as insignificant as bureaucrat on a wiki, and even if we're rarely using it and not enjoying it when we do. Dan, Tom and I each have stepped down as bureaucrat before, then gone back and gotten ourselves repromoted - we ended up making a rule to keep us from doing that again, and since we each did that once it kind of balances out. |
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| − | I've had people ask me why I decided to step down from bureaucrat and retire from the wiki, so here goes. |
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| + | But the truth is, I'm done here, I've been done here for months, and if it wasn't for the fact that there's no takebacks on giving up your bureaucrat spot (especially now that Ilan got promoted into the spot) I'd have left this wiki a long time ago. |
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| − | # I wasn't doing a good enough job with content-related matters. I haven't played any of the pre-GTA3 games or either of the GTA3 era Stories games, and I detested all the GTA4 era games. I also don't know the first thing about vehicles in the real world. So when I'd encounter a content dispute related to pre-GTA3 or GTA4, or something to do with the vehicles, I wasn't able to mediate and solve the content dispute due to lack of knowledge. And if I'd come across an obviously poorly written article, I wouldn't be able to do anything to fix it up. In my opinion, even if they have other stuff to do, the best content writers should be the staff on a wikia. |
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| − | # Frustration with the lack of professionalism, and the lack of interest in professionalism. I don't mean this offensively to anyone, but this wiki has a fairly young userbase, and many people just don't see the point of following the Fair Use Law (note, I said Law, not policy, because it's US law). And so what I called "trying to bring the wiki in line", other people viewed as "stomping all over their hard work". For example, the sprawling trivia sections that most people liked but that I insisted had to go. I do think it's an age related thing, because I'd have felt the same way at age 15. But the only user who even agreed with me on professionalism, Dan, "agreed" but thought it wasn't that big of a deal and that I was taking things too seriously. |
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| − | # Tired of being disliked. Tying in with #2, what I viewed as trying to bring the wiki in line, a lot of people viewed as me being a mean-spirited hard-headed dictator. I've been known to take a swing and a half at people, as anyone who knows me pre-GTAWiki can attest to, but I'd also for the most part rather get along with people... as people who know me pre-GTAWiki can attest to. |
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| − | # Workload. Because I was the only staff interested in professionalism, I was the only one worrying about the massive amounts of improperly uploaded images. And let me tell anyone who hasn't been an administrator, renaming images and updating the links left behind is ''tedious as all hell''. Ideally, a wiki this size would want around five people watching the incoming images. And working by myself I didn't have the time or energy to do a good job with all the images - either I deleted images that I ''could'' have helped license and name because there were 150 more images in the queue, or I gave 10-15 images the works in a day and continually fell further behind because we usually get more than 10-15 images uploaded per day. |
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| − | # Lack of enjoyment of editing the wiki. As I said before, the staff should be the best content writers, and I barely got a chance to write any content. On GTA San Andreas, a game I did play, I got to rewrite the articles [[T-Bone Mendez]], [[Millie Perkins]] and [[Maccer]]. This is what I prefer to do with wikis in general, but I don't have the energy to do it when I have to mess about with wrongly named images all day. Also, as I mentioned in #3, being disliked isn't pleasant, no matter how right you are. |
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| + | ==What I do now== |
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| + | Mostly dispute resolution, advice giving and that kind of stuff. If anything stepping down helps me to work on such things because I can talk to people without the threatening presence of being someone who can block them. |
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| − | Actually I had planned to completely leave the wiki, but even if I only choose to lurk and such, a lot of the good things I can do still require the tools, so I requested a repromotion to Administrator. |
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| + | Sometimes I actually write content too. Mostly I look for articles with sprawling disorganized trivia sections and rewrite them integrating as much trivia as I can into the article, deleting the bunk. |
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| − | [[Category:Administrator|McJeff]] |
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Revision as of 16:06, 27 August 2014
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Former bureaucrat from 2011-2014.
Semi-retired.
Why I stepped down
I never really had the knowledge of the GTA series to be a great content editor. I played and loved Vice City and San Andreas, and most of my best edits were to VC and SA related pages. I didn't care for GTA3, probably because I started with Vice City and compared to it, GTA3 seemed really primitive with the small car selection, simple missions and silent protagonist. I hated the bleak angsty aesthetic and the driving physics of GTA4, and never played GTAs 1 and 2.
I got the job because the wiki was rebuilding in the wake of the community split. A guy named WikisEditor somehow knew about my work as a bureaucrat on Bully Wiki and invited me (and my fellow bureaucrat Messi1983) to GTA Wiki not because of my content writing but because of my administrative knowledge. We put the wiki back together, got rules written and a fully functional staff promoted and trained.
And with that done, there wasn't much for me to do.
Every so often something requiring bureaucratish knowledge would happen, like the Dodo/Sasquatch dispute or the January 2014 Administrator Elections. But aside from the occasional Big Thing, all I was doing on GTA Wiki was occasionally reverting vandalism or blocking someone, and enforcing the image policy. And enforcing the image policy is tedious, takes a lot of time, and makes you unpopular with editors who don't see the point.
When GTAV came out at first I thought it was awesome. Then I suddenly lost all interest in it. I think it was in the lead-up to a heist where you have to store a getaway vehicle... I don't know. I found that so annoying that I just stopped playing and never started again. And when I realized that GTAV wasn't as great as I thought it was, I began to think it was time for me to leave the wiki.
Funny thing is, it's hard to let go if only because it's human nature to hang onto power, even if it's a power as insignificant as bureaucrat on a wiki, and even if we're rarely using it and not enjoying it when we do. Dan, Tom and I each have stepped down as bureaucrat before, then gone back and gotten ourselves repromoted - we ended up making a rule to keep us from doing that again, and since we each did that once it kind of balances out.
But the truth is, I'm done here, I've been done here for months, and if it wasn't for the fact that there's no takebacks on giving up your bureaucrat spot (especially now that Ilan got promoted into the spot) I'd have left this wiki a long time ago.
What I do now
Mostly dispute resolution, advice giving and that kind of stuff. If anything stepping down helps me to work on such things because I can talk to people without the threatening presence of being someone who can block them.
Sometimes I actually write content too. Mostly I look for articles with sprawling disorganized trivia sections and rewrite them integrating as much trivia as I can into the article, deleting the bunk.