User:McJeff

Bureaucrat from 2011-2014, and a few months in 2015. Currently very sporadically active on this wiki.

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, The 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 don't like the GTA games anymore
Because fuck angst that's why. You heard me.

In all seriousness, when I play a game and beat that game, I expect the protagonist to win too. I'm not a fan of deconstructions and aesops - if I'm playing a GTA game and my character doesn't end up a filthy rich crime god at the end of the game a la Tommy and CJ, I feel like the whole game was a waste of time. See also: Red Dead Redemption, where I felt that the ending ruined the entire game.

I guess the thing about overly realistic realism applies too, but other people have said it far better and in more detail than I'm about to.

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, as of mid 2016, Grand Theft Wiki is dead. 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.

A thought on strict rules on demoting staff for inactivity
It's stupid and shouldn't be done.

When Dan/Messi, The Tom and I were the b-crats here on the wiki, we tirelessly ignored requests from younger users who said we NEEEEEDED a full roster of staff on the wiki CONSTANTLY because we needed to always have someone on hand to revert vandalism IMMEDIATELY and it wasn't FAIR to the people who weren't admins yet.

So as soon as VaultBoy became a bureaucrat he made a bunch of terrible rules about activity. VaultBoy was a great admin but not a good bureaucrat - I'd like to be a lot harsher on that matter but I don't want to break the rules. Nonetheless remember that he unblocked a friend of his against the entire community's consensus to get a promotion on GTA Myths Wiki and unilaterally changed a bunch of rules he didn't like. Even though he's gone, the wiki is suffering from the policies he rammed through, either with a vote or without.

And now we have bureaucrats and administrators quitting and unquitting on a regular basis and causing pointless drama and noticeboard clutter. Also, we have a half empty staff roster because with GTA V having been out for years and no news about a GTA VI yet, there's a lot less activity on the wiki and less need for staff.