Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-209421-20130314105636/@comment-209421-20130320031348

InMemorium wrote: Flashfire212 wrote:

InMemorium wrote:

4. I'm not skipping the election process again. Done it once, accidentally created a monster. As much as I've seen a lot of melodrama on the wiki's chat in the last few days, this point still intrigues me. When did this happen? Years ago. As I said, I hand chose the first four admins. I didn't found the site, but the founder had abandoned it, so we were overrun with trolls. I asked Wikia Staff to intervene, and I chose four admins at that time - KittheCat, Manta-Bee, Guyviroth and myself. I thought, back then, that Guyviroth and I would counteract each other, but I was wrong. Kit became the first bureaucrat, and promoted more users into admins, and they started making all of their decisions off-the site in private votes, which I was not privy to, despite being an admin. As such, most of the fights within the admin group was me against them, because I didn't agree with their choices. So, in essence, I created the original, near-secular administration team, and at the same time, I gave Guyviroth (who was demoted and banned after that point repeatedly) his first run with power. Well I decided to take a look at Guyviroth's page and I noticed a few things that caught my eye;

1) With over 4000 edits, very few of which were roleplaying and most where his own articles, I'd say he did quite a bit for the site in terms of bulking it up. His drawings are pretty amazing too, but that's just a personal taste.

2) His ban list is a bit... redundant, for lack of a suitable word. I mean, most of his bans were overturned within 24 hours. A couple were long-kept, naturally, but it's a bit fishy to me that this "monster" has had a number of bans, meaning that he'd also have to be unbanned numerous times.

3) Joining the wiki since 2009, I'd think a "monster" would have been banned, finally, within the first month. Not three years later.

4) You said his "first run of power". That would mean he's had more than one oppurtunity at adminship? Wouldn't that also mean that the users had some sort of confidence in him, what with needing nominations?

Now I'm not saying I like the guy, or even defending him, but he's clearly not one of these fire-and-forget wannabe trolls or vandals that often attack wikis. There's more to this than simply being "we made a monster" or whatever kind of melodramatic nonsense people would like to use for a scapegoat.

To be fair, he wasn't who I meant as a monster. I was more referring to the old administration team and their methods, of which he was their scapegoat. They were good people, but the fact that they ran the site as an oligarchy instead of a democracy always rubbed me the wrong way. Now, about Guy. If the admin team needed something done that the other users didn't like, they would repromote him, and use him to do it. No, he would regularly break rules, but in my eyes, he was for a long time one of our better users, even if his actions lead to the wiki being divided - some rumors suggest that his hand was in a lot of the other admin's decisions, even when demoted. As for those bans, well, he's a complicated issue, and since I delivered very few, if any, of those bans, I can't comment on that. And no, he's no troll. In fact, he's one of those people who you can't stand in peace-time, but you couldn't go past having at your side in a firefight. When there was major troll issues, he was one of the best to deal with them. When there wasn't, the fact that he would constantly break the rules about swearing and insulting behaviour made him a rather controversial figure.