User:McJeff

Template:Bureaucrat

Userboxes MB This user edits with the MonoBook skin. This user thinks San Andreas is the best GTA game This user thinks GTA IV is the worst GTA game This user thinks Tommy Vercetti is the best protagonist This user thinks that Niko Bellic is the worst protagonist. This user doesn't believe in any GTA myths This user is proud to be American This ol' user sure is a redneck, boy howdy! This user is an Atheist.

“

Because to win in the game of football, or life, you have to annihilate errything in your path... in a blind rage.

”

— BJ Smith

Bureaucrat from 2011-2014, temporarily out of retirement as of 2015.

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.

Why I came back

I was already still slightly involved with this wiki, mostly by giving people advice on policies, helping with dispute resolution and voting on requests for promotion. So when two Bureaucrats and four Administrators stepped down or were demoted for inactivity in January 2015, I offered to step back up until one of the newly promoted Administrators was ready to become a bureaucrat.

A thought about administrators quitting

Something that's come up as of early 2015 is the amount of turnover we've had with administrators. That is to say, people get promoted to administrator and after a while their edits start tapering off, they lose interest in the wiki and either just go inactive or resign.

The reason that is, is because being an administrator (or bureaucrat) is really not all that much fun.

Admins and b'crats don't get to do much normal editing because they're busy doing the busywork - watching recent changes, moving images around, performing dispute resolution, that kind of stuff. Especially if they take a hard line on things like images or civility, administrators become unpopular with general editors.

The other thing is that it's human nature to gradually lose interest in things. Especially with younger editors, they'll get involved in things at school, or end up with responsibilities they didn't have when they started editing (one of our b'crats resigned because of army commitments) and that leads to them stopping editing. But even older editors lose interest. Remember the Community Split, how a bunch of our then-best editors went off to Grand Theft Wiki? Well, Grand Theft Wiki is practically dead because Gboyers has been MIA since summer 2014 and Jfletcher lost interest in the GTA series entirely and resigned. The reason I bring that up isn't to bash Grand Theft Wiki, but as evidence that it's not just on this wiki where such things happen.

People lose interest in things. I've lost interest in the GTA series entirely by this point, and my continuing interest in this wiki is purely in the political/inner workings of it. And even that is waning, since I retired before most of the active staff started editing. The fact that we have administrators and bureaucrats quit doesn't mean there's anything wrong with GTA Wiki.