Guild Wars Wiki talk:Requests for adminship/Gem

I don't want to start off with a harsh oppose, but what has changed since last time? The general userbase still has no clue about RfAs and sysopship, so I don't see that being a huge factor. -Auron 08:12, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Are you asking about what has changed with Gem or what has changed with the process? -- ab.er.rant 08:47, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I see no difference with Gem, but that's probably because I haven't seen anything of Gem for two months or more. I was mostly asking about "This situation has now changed due to the change in opinnions and attitudes towards admins and I now find myself fitting for the role." -Auron 08:49, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

That's probably because he just realised that sysops here and sysops on GuildWiki are very different. -- ab.er.rant 09:08, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not saying that I have 'improved' nor do I think or 'hope' that wiki standards for sysops have dropped, like you are saying in your vote. I do think that the community now thinks of the sysop role differently. I don't think that the sysop task has really changed at all since it has been more of a janitorial duty for most of the time on this wiki. It's just that people previously still held admins as some sort of leaders due to the adminship model at GuildWiki and they do not think like that anymore as is evident from the discussions raging all over the wiki. -- (gem / talk) 09:18, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

And to take different point of view, my reconfirmation would probably have gotten me reconfirmed at that point due to people supporting me with my hard work on the admin tasks. That has not changed. The thing that has changed is the main reason for my withdrawal as pointed out above. Ofcourse I might be wrong in guessing the result, maby there were lots of other opposers who didn't yet post on the RfA, but that is unlikely. In that case I would have hoped that they would still have thrown me a comment on my talk page about the stuff that they didn't like and no one has done that yet. I haven't received negative comments about anything else than those on the former reconfirmation page and therefor I have no reason to think that there are some hidden reasons for opposing me. I'm open for anything ofcourse if it is as well presented as some opposing votes on the former RfA page. -- (gem / talk) 09:28, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

(As I side note more related to the issue of Karlos and not this RfA I find it most amusing that Karlos says 'nothing has changed' even though his vote has changed from neutral to oppose. xD ) -- (gem / talk) 09:28, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

A question for naysayers

I have a question for the naysayers, just out of curiosity. When you agree with Karlos' statement of "Nothing changed", what, may I ask, were you guys referring to? That he has poor knowledge of how a wiki works? That he doesn't know how to use the delete and block tools properly? Or that he has a poor ability of following policies? Because if it's none of these three, I don't see why he would make a bad sysop. -- ab.er.rant 16:13, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Gem: This is one of those situations where I don't have any choice. Sorry.

I think Gem as a sysop causes more good than harm. However, there's still that little bit of harm that I don't like -- the confrontational nature mostly (see Gem's warning to Skuld oh-so-long ago in Skuld's talk archives), but also a little inflexibility. Since we've got a big pool of mostly-good sysops (I feel the same way about Lemming as I do about Gem, though I like Gem personally a more), I don't see why we should add a sysop who isn't 100% positive.

—Tanaric 19:59, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Tanaric, no offense taken, I understand your opinnion and I have always appreciated that you are sincere with it. :)

I do understand where your negative feelings about my actions as a sysop come from and I know more than one place where I have acted in a way that wasn't appropriate and healthy for the community. Looking at my user page history at GuildWiki will give some hints of that stuff, if someone happens to be interested. All of these were caused by my temperamental and exploding nature. Yeah, many of you might be surprised, but I do sometimes explode in a burst of aggression. This is something that I have inherited or learned from my father. I know it's a problem and I've been trying to get rid of it for a long time. The reason why most of you might not have noticed this is that in a text based system like the wiki it takes me long enough to write an angry message that I tend to calm down before reaching the 'save page' stage. I have the habit of re-reading everything that I write when in an angry state of mind (that's the best thing I've learned to do up to this date), and in 95% of those situations I either re-write or completely delete the message that I have written. In real life the situation is a bit more problematic since I just say out loud what comes to my mind and I can't re-say it after calming down as the harm has already been done. I'm glad that Kalomeli copes with it very well, but she understands that even though I explode, I calm down quickly and in a very short time I'm like nothing ever happened. Anyway, there are the 5% of the situations when something gets through my re-reading process and I tend to make a mess of the situation. After posting the first comment I can't back off anymore and instantly change my mind on the thing by saying something like "sorry, I didn't mean that. please ignore the message". This is why I sometimes get in situations like the one on Skulds page. I got angry about his behavior somewhere and I went to post the message on his talk. I didn't re-read the message and posted it. Then people came to defend Skuld, and I should have admitted that it was a false alarm, which I was unable to do. You can see a similiar pattern in some of the recent heated up discussions where my first post is out of line with the rest that I've written later on after calming down.

Ok, now that I've explained all that I'll tell you why I don't think that it will cause any additional problems even if I'd be a sysop. Everyone is free to disagree, comment, point out additional stuff or ask me something about this and I wont get offended even if you disagree whole heartedly. Like I've said many times, the current sysop role is more of a janitorial role than a leadership role like it is on GuildWiki. Even the ArbComm system is changing to support that system better. This means that I wont be in a position to make 'final warnings' like the one I made to Skuld. It's the ArbComms job to give warnings and make decisions based on stuff that isn't strictly policy controlled. Also, as you might have noticed from my recent contributions, I am aiming to keep out of any heated up discussions until I am ready to take part calmly. If there is something that I feel strongly about, I've posted a day or a half later after taking a break from the computer. This is the biggest thing I learned during the two past months. Ofcourse there is no way for you to know if it's true that I'm learning to control myself.

I do not expect any of the users who voted oppose to change their votes. That's definitely not the point of this message. I just wanted to (finally) explain why I sometimes acted like I did and wanted to brag about how I think I'm chaning my world to a better place to live. ;P -- (gem / talk) 23:51, 23 September 2007 (UTC)