User blog:Gideoncrawle/5th Wikiversary: Times Have Changed

I’ve been a registered user here for five years now, including almost 3-1/2 years as an admin. I’ve seen many changes, and now I must add one of my own:

I am resigning as administrator. I announced on Chat several weeks ago that I was considering this step, so the other admins wouldn’t be caught flatfooted.

Your first question is probably, “Why?”

Short version: I don’t feel like part of the community anymore, so the maintenance work that used to be a labor of love has become a burden.

Long version: I’ve been drifting away from the wiki for quite some time, largely coinciding with the wiki’s focus shift from fanfics, to roleplays, since RPs don’t interest me. Although we did see a brief spike in story editing activity around the holidays, commenting activity on people’s stories collapsed long ago and has never recovered, and the monthly Features are effectively dead. Generally speaking, the people who still post stories here can’t get feedback anymore unless they know the right people. Most of what little commenting we still see is among small groups of people who review each other’s stories but don’t seem to venture outside their circles.

During the wiki’s heyday, I averaged 250 edits per month. When I became an admin, my rate increased to 350 per month, with admin tasks accounting for the difference. While I’m still averaging something over 100 edits per month, admin tasks (mostly related to wiki cleanup) account for most of that, with the occasional round of subscriber notices accounting for most of the remainder.

Moreover, the cleanup effort came to take so much of my time that I never really got to know the new crop of users; and with the old guard increasingly becoming chat-focused or disappearing altogether in the last couple of years, I’ve become ever more isolated from what’s left of the wiki’s social scene. It’s gotten to the point that it’s mainly three people—Rhonda, Space and Lilac—who keep me here at all (socially speaking) and all three are increasingly prone to extended absences. In particular, the fact that Rhonda didn’t drop in even briefly during the holidays is a bad sign.

As the time I spend on the wiki dwindled, I’ve been spending more time on fanfiction.net, and have ported several of my stories there in the last two years. I’ll admit that I tend to feel equally peripheral there, but it’s a larger community; and while writing/reviewing activity isn’t what it used to be on that site, either, the stories still matter there in a way that they no longer seem to here. I’ve also been spending a great deal of time on TV Tropes, where I’ve recently returned to my long-delayed project of launching a separate works page for the Bambi novels. (The novels’ tropes currently comprise one section of the page for the better known Disney film adaptation.)

I will continue to update The Legend of Total Drama Island here, despite the fact that feedback for it has largely dried up, because a recent poll revealed that a fair number of people still read it here; and I’ll continue to read/review the stories I’ve been following if and when they get updated, but I really don’t see myself doing much here socially in the foreseeable future. I have no intention of leaving altogether, and I’ll continue to check in regularly to see what’s going on, but this is no longer the wiki I fell in love with five years ago.

Resigning from the admin staff was a difficult decision, but the decision has been made. It’s hard to walk away from being relevant, but that’s the thing: it’s been a long time since I’ve felt relevant around here. I’m not angry, just sad.