Thread:Imamadmad/@comment-188432-20131202045210/@comment-4189499-20131202101905

CzechOut, I very much appreciate your feelings in this matter, and I would like to respond to both your main points. But firstly, I would like to direct you to your quote "active bureaucrat on site". You're hardly ever on DWA! I understand you're busy at TDC, but I really seem to be the only one who ever tries to do anything other than just answer questions! Yes, when I enquired after assistance about a month ago you helped out by finding DWA a temporary admin to look things over (may I add instead of looking over things yourself as current bureaucrat. I am very thankful to SOTO for helping, but you are bureaucrat of both wikis!), yet most of the time if I leave you a message, you don't even receive it because of that answers talk page bug. Have you thought that you could get around the bug by not dismissing the message notification? And yes, you have a bot, yet Corey has made more edits with his in the past week than yours ever has on DWA, despite you having yours flagged for much longer. The simple fact is, that despite your status as bureaucrat at DWA, you rarely ever actually take up the position and edit there. Most of the decisions that have been made there lately I have had to make on my own simply because nobody else responds. That's nobody else including you. And may I add that one of the reasons nobody responds when I try and start discussion is because Master of Spiders has scared/"disgust[ed]" most of the active discussers away.

Look, in retrospect I can see that I should have contacted you about Corey and his bot first before sending in the bot flag. I was just so excited to have somebody with a bot who seemed eager to do regular bot runs for things such as spelling (and have you seen the level of spelling which currently exists on DWA?) that I just wanted him to get started as soon as I made sure he agreed in writing to do what we as admins said. Anyway, it's not like he has any admin rights which he could abuse with his bot, and he can be blocked if things start going wrong. But yes, I should have contacted you first. That was wrong of me. In the future I will try and contact all other not inactive admins before doing something such as this and start a conversation to discuss it.

However, on the matter of the so-called "witchhunt" against Master of Spiders: this isn't something I have started, nor something that started only in the last few days. The tensions between Master of Spiders and the rest of the recurring userbase have been high for a while now, the first call for his de-sysoping occurring way back in June. The tensions at the time had been diffused (by me), yet the problems popped up again only a few month later. Problems of the exact same nature. I urged that if users had a complaint against Master of Spiders that they should take it to the forums and that I would examine the evidence. I tried to work with Spiders. I tried to look over the discussion at the beginning with an outsider's eye after it had been started by another user, but the evidence I have come across and seen and experienced against Master of Spiders was too strong, and I decided to speak out and share my own thoughts and complaints.

This isn't the first time I have criticised Spiders for his actions. Constantly throughout the year I have had to tell Spiders to go easy on the blocking, starting when you first got blocked back last December and continuing to even just this October when I complained about him doing the exact same sort of thing to another user. He very much "needs seasoning", however he resists every attempt to do so. That is the main problem with him. If there had been 10 complaints about 10 different problems, that would have been fine. However there have been at least 6 complaints that I cited in my long analysis of his behaviour which were all for the exact same thing spread out over the past year, namely, blocking too fast without warning. He could have changed. I told him how he could change, namely by talking to people before blocking them. Out of all my arguments in that statement, that was the main one. That is the most important one. If that didn't happen, I would feel no need to get rid of Master of Spiders. The rest was just extra stuff that added extra weight to the fact he was unfit too admin.

Look, I'm not going to repeat everything now. I've put a lot of thought and effort into the ideas in the post I put up yesterday, and if you want to know all the reasons I think Master of Spiders should go, just re-read that. However, I did bring up the point that Master of Spiders doesn't use most of his admin powers. In fact, he uses exactly 2, and abuses one of them while refusing to stop. He doesn't even do the kinds of thing that are expected of admins yet aren't exactly user right given powers, admin responsibilities you could call them, such as contributing to big important discussions relating to the wiki and talking with users when they have problems and need help. The point of that argument was to say that it really wouldn't be a big loss to him to have his admin powers taken away. He couldn't delete questions any more, that's it! He doesn't use anything else! Comparing Spiders to Shambala108 is a completely unfair comparison! Shambala is a lovely person who I always see trying to help out around the forums at Tardis, talking to users and explaining the rules patiently to them when the need to be informed (yes, I still for some reason find myself lurking in the Tardis Forums despite rarely making an edit). She may not use all the things being an admin brings, but she uses some of those things very well. The world would be a much better place if there were more people like Shambala around. However, Spiders does not try to help people. If they make a mistake, instead of correcting them, he blocks them. This is not a very good method of behavioural correction, as I have pointed out numerous times, however he has refused to fix his methods. That is the problem with him.

"And, as I noted in the thread, his blocking of IP users really isn't a horrible thing. It's a good faith effort to protect the wiki.  If you're going to actively encourage people to be IP editors then you have to accept that imperfect blocks are gonna happen." Not if IP editors are the only ones doing anything! While I don't actively discourage IP editing outside the welcome message which tells people to sign up for an account, I don't encourage IP editing either. However, the main users of DWA who prefer editing under IP have both replied when I've gotten curious and asked them about their preference with their own reasons which I respect. However, just because somebody doesn't sign up for an account doesn't mean they're a bad editor, or even unidentifiable! IP addresses don't change much outside of a certain range or repeat that often, and anyway, one can identify some of the regular IPs from their writing style alone. Therefore, they are not anonymous and one can follow their edits. It is through blocking these regular IP users that Spiders has done the most damage to Doctor Who Answers. These are the people who regularly went through new questions, answering them and fixing them. In the time since Spiders' blocking finally made them leave, the rate of answered questions dropped from 99% to 95% and the rate of categorisation and the state of the categories has diminished remarkably since the best categoriser felt forced to leave. Is it really a benefit to Doctor Who Answers to have somebody force all the good editors to leave?

"We'll then prepare a joint message signed by both of us, in which we tell him, "Look, you're going to need to change this one behavior over the next three months, or we'll de-sysop you."" After all that has happened so far this past year, do you really think that Spiders is going to suddenly change his ways after stubbornly refusing just because we write a message together? Feel free to write your own message in the thread defending Spiders if you like, but I have already written and delivered mine. I have pointed to much rock solid, irrefutable evidence as to why Master of Spiders is not a fit admin, and I have worked alongside him actively for a year and a day now and have tried many times to work with him without success.

And finally: "This needs to be about teaching him, not lynching him." If teaching him were going to work, it would have done so at some point in the last 366 days. However, it hasn't, and so I think it's time that we get rid of the person doing the most damage to the wiki and give it a chance to recover before Christmas.

This is past the tipping point for me. And to be honest, if Master of Spiders stays, I'm not sure if I will. The thing that made editing DWA fun for me was talking with the regular users and working with them to make DWA the best it could be, and it really isn't all that fun now the vast majority of them are gone because of Spiders. Who wants to work towards something if they don't feel that anyone shares the same goal? Maybe you have never felt that way because Tardis Data Core is a huge wiki with loads of dedicated regular contributors and lots of support from Wikia themselves because TDC is one of the biggest and oldest wikis on Wikis. You got your Spotlight request approved in a matter of days. I was holding my breath hoping that they would even look at ours in time, and then they put it up early without warning. On top of that, Wikia comes to you to make things such as the Doctor Who menu and the Doctor Who quizzes. You even got their help in redesigning your front page. Back on Doctor Who Answers, I can't trust my fellow admins to read the announcements I make in the forums or contribute when I try and talk about things to do with improving the wiki. I can't even expect them to reply to messages written on their talk pages! What made me want to stay were the users, some of whom I started to consider friends, and they've gone. Editing DWA has started to become a chore, and when that happens, that's usually the first sign to quit. I really don't want to quit, but I have other things which need my attention more, and if improvement doesn't happen soon, starting first with Spiders' dismissal, then, unlike the Tenth Doctor, I don't think I want to stay.