User talk:Entropy/Archive 30

Upsetting
Well, of course Spanish Guild Wiki is a fansite. They aren't competition. We on the other hand, directly compete with their (dare I say, at the time of it's launch, redundant and absolutely pointless?) wiki, and naturally they can't endorse the very thing that inspired and in many cases formed the foundation of their own (rip-off) service. Now I must stop talking before this turns into a wall of text rant. By the way, I've been waiting about 10 hours to post this anti-Anet message, but I will refrain from Qwest-bashing here. Entrea   [Talk]  01:57, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
 * It's still a slap in the face considering that we once had specialty fansite status - and in fact, could have qualified for even higher...and around the time (I think) that GWW came out, it was revoked. I realize that GWW only supports the English language, and so the "threat" theory is valid. But still...it angers me. I suppose that's how things always are in corporate business, though...so stupid that the two wikis are separated by basically only a license (and the all-important "ownership", which translates to either +e-peen or $$$). [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 07:29, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Ditto everything Entropy said above. -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png]]) 07:43, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Ditto again. I wasn't even an active editor here at the time, just a reader, and the whole license/fansite issues were annoying enough to permanently bias me against GWW.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 08:14, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Two Words
I'm sorry.--Łô√ë îğá †ħŕášħ 09:53, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Me too. [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 10:40, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

The music is great. Standing up to what you are is, too. Welcome back. --◄mendel► 01:52, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Celebration
Hurray, Entropy's still here. It's good to know, although I'm still a bit confused over what happened. That doesn't really matter though, whaat matters is that ENTROPY DIDN'T LEAVE!!! Seriously, Entropy, even though you may not really know us in reall life, we consider you a friend, or at least I do, and I know that others do too. Arcdash 16:21, 31 December 2008 (UTC)


 * You keep your friends chained up in the cellar so they may never leave you ever again? Oh wait, hmmm, I mustn't ... there's something I need to do, like, take soem Xmas cookies down to the cellar because ... erm, that's where my room is, yeah, I live in the cellar. Not YOUR cellar, obviously, erm, what can I say? Gotta go! --◄mendel► 01:42, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Re: "post of leadership"
While I am happy to see the concept of the administrative positions named as a non-identical concept from the "post of leadership" in your message, something in what you wrote brought up an issue that has troubled me for a long time.

Yes, you have a de facto "post of leadership" on this wiki. It happened due to a combination of factors, and your position as a Bcrat happened to be, IMHO, one of the earlier triggering catalysts that ends up placing you in that post.

You have been in a rather unique position in the history of GuildWiki. You see, the GuildWiki community never really had a de facto leader previously (at least going as far back as the GuildWiki history I am acquainted with). Gravewit happened to won the "ownership" of the actual wiki, but he was nowhere near being the community's leader. Nor were the other Bcrats. They were just active community members with the actual system permission to promote other sysops. The ones trusted to be asked to arbitrate just have a fair reputation (and have sysop rights to enforce the result if necessary), but they aren't seen as the de facto leaders of the wiki community either.

GuildWiki was led collectively by the active members of the community, many of whom weren't even admins at all.

The above sentence is still more or less true today, in terms of what happens in the main article space. On the other hand, much of the community also considers you as a de facto leader, something we didn't use to have. It is hard for me to really decide whether that is a good thing or not. For a healthy wiki that reached critical mass with much more room to grow, I would generally consider having a singular leader at the top as a bad thing. However, for a wiki that from a number of perspectives is already dead (in fact, has been dead for many many months), having a focused leadership might help give a sense of direction to the community, or it might worsen the health of the community such that the singular leader holds/becomes the last straw.

Basically, I am worried about the community becoming dependent on having somebody in the "post of leadership". If you did not return, I would not have assumed that post. It's not something that just came with the Bcrat position, and even if I had a perfect score in all the other criteria to be trusted with the post, my semi-inactivity along would have disqualified me from being the leader of the community. If you did not return, I would have continued to observe and see if the post of leadership would have naturally fallen onto somebody else (who probably would not be a bcrat), and if that didn't happen by the time some kind of alarm in my head starts to scream, I would have tried to spend more time on the wiki to try to get the community used to not having a leader again.

Back when Mendel was recently promoted to adminship, I told him that it was now his responsibility to doubly make sure that for any stuff he used to do as a user and would be continuing doing as admin, new users will perceive those as stuff they themselves can do also, as opposed to something Mendel does because he's an admin. I feel we have to proactively reinforce the YAV principle, instead of just passively obeying/quoting it.

In response to your "request for judgment" from the community, while the outcome you listed were simply whether to continue grant you in the post of leadership, I (with all the authority a fellow community member may command) would "sentence" you something else:
 * For every person ("A") who valued you and deferred to you as de facto leader, you need to empower somebody ("B") through motivation, encouragement, and/or other means of positive reinforcement such that A will also value B and consider B one of the co-leaders of GuildWiki. A and B can be the same individual.

Or in plainer language, you need to make everyone on GuildWiki who considered you as its de facto leader to feel there are other de facto co-leaders. It's not something you can simply solve by promoting Bcrats, because we do have a huge precedents of Bcrats who aren't considered leaders.

In any case, I still trust you with the tools of Ban/Del/Prot and user rights management, regardless of what I think about you and the "post of leadership".

Moving to a slightly different topic, to your original farewell address, I only responded on the topic of identities on the internet, as that was a topic I had strong opinions about. On the topic of your departure itself, I pointedly ignored it. But now that you are back, I would like to refer you to something I wrote on one of Warwick's talkpages a long time ago. Unfortunately it is now extremely hard to locate because Warwick uses move to archive. If somebody will dig up a list of all my contributions scattered in the histories of the various Warwick talk page articles, that would be quite helpful so that I can actually show Entropy what I wanted to refer her to. -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 10:59, 2 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh good, so I'm not the only one who is bothered by such things. :p
 * I know in the past I've (usually) tried to emphasize how what I do is not because of my user rights, and such and such, but I get what you are saying...YAV doesn't just cover that aspect of being valuable. There's also the, shall we call it, "solidarity aspect". We're all brothers and sisters in this together, with intrinsic worth that does not need to be proven to be appreciated. (Correlates to AGF too.)
 * I'd like to claim that I have never actively sought out to become this leader type person; it wasn't a premeditated plan. Like you say, it is a combination of factors - bureaucrat, "cult of personality", activity, etc. But then again, I've never actively opposed it either.
 * For your sentence, I would like to imagine that I have served it, but I would probably be overestimating what "certain users" feel about themselves. I try to empower other users, whether through spreading democracy or other means, but I don't have a real "success story" so to speak. I believe that through my influence I have made certain users more important/empowered than they otherwise would have been, but probably not to the standards you have specified. (For that matter, in recent memory I cannot recall anyone who even approaches "co-leader" like status...I begin to see the trouble.)
 * Lastly, if you could give me even a rough estimate as to when this post would have been, that would help. I probably even know what it is, if you have some contextual clues. [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 11:57, 2 January 2009 (UTC)