Board Thread:Shingeki no Kyojin Wiki/@comment-5774380-20150322152908

As some users should have noted, there has been a lot of movement in the administrative group of this Wiki during the last month, with two bureaucrats, Hfc2x and NeoSuperior, retiring from the site; a former admin, PrelateZeratul, being demoted from his position; and the charge of only active admin and bureaucrat ultimately passing to me.

This situation was the consecuence of this series of cases:

Since this issue has not ended yet and I'm being urged by PrelateZeratul to grant his admin rights back and step down from my charges, this is my response to the three aforementioned cases, plus PrelateZeratul's adminship request and the messages left in my wall.
 * 1) Proposal to Remove Hfc2x
 * 2) Discussion to block hfc2x
 * 3) Proposal to Remove NeoSuperior

Before starting, I'd strongly suggest to any user not familiar with these events to read all the information linked above before forming a judgment. It's a lot of text but, as I confirmed by myself, things are not as clear as they might seem at first; especially when you only hear the version of just one of those involved. What follows is just my personal conclusion that I reached after doing that.

The situation began when the then admin PrelateZeratul opened the first of those threads asking for the demotion of Hfc2x as bureaucrat and admin, and his possible blocking, accussing him of three faults:


 * 1) Value his personal feelings over his duties on the Wiki.
 * 2) Refusing to talk to him and participate in the decisions of the site, and not even longer wanting to be an admin.
 * 3) Bullying and insulting him.

Although presented in this way such claims could seem severe, after reading the cases completely it was evident to me that the real situation was very different (and that's why I'm asking others to do the same).

PrelateZeratul supported the first of those points with the reasoning that Hfc2x didn't want to promote him as admin when he presented his request, despite fulfilling the requirements to be considered for the position, and because Hfc2x openly revealed that he doesn't like him.

Though PrelateZeratul seems to believe that because he has more than 1000 edits he deserves to be an admin, if you pay close attention to that page, that's not so. Those are not the requirements to become an admin, those are just the requirements to present a request, as if it were a curriculum. However, the admin position is not about edits, is about judgement, about making decisions (often difficult ones), and corresponds to the bureaucrat in turn to assess if a candidate meet those skills, according to their own opinion.

So, it doesn't matter if a user has one million edits, if for whatever reason the bureaucrat considers that they lack the skills needed to be granted the responsibilities of an admin, they will not get the position.

However, it must be noted that despite his initial denial to become PrelateZeratul an admin, Hfc2x changed his mind when another user, Gourgeist, recommended him for the charge, and Hfc2x granted him the rights anyway.

This happened on January 23rd, and on February 19th, after less than one month of being an admin, PrelateZeratul opened the first of the cited threads wanting to demote and block Hfc2x for the mentioned reasons.

As I explained, I don't see how the first point is supported, since from my point of view it looks exactly the opposite: Hfc2x overcame his personal feelings and became PrelateZeratul an admin regardless what he thought about him, and the mention of that fact as evidence of a fault seems contradictory as it was a situation that turned to the favor of the accuser.

The second point, Hfc2x's refusal to discuss the Wiki matters, is also questionable. The concrete events that led to that claim were that PrelateZeratul wanted to create a list of minor characters and make changes to the Manual of Style, and when he asked Hfc2x for his opinion, the latter didn't answer and even blocked him from Skype.

Though this was certainly a rude attitude from Hfc2x, PrelateZeratul should know that not all the decisions of the Wiki need to be taken in consensus with all the admins. As an admin on another Wiki, I can say that admins have a certain independence (otherwise there would be no point in having more than one): when it comes to minor changes, they can operate individually based on what they believe best; and even when the change is bigger and it's appropriate to consult the others (like in that case), they always have the right to abstain from the discussion.

So, when Hfc2x didn't answer PrelateZeratul's requests to discuss the list of minor characters and the Manual of Style, it was obvious that he didn't want to participate in those matters, so the decision was left entirely in PrelateZeratul's hands. However, instead of doing the job according to his own thoughts (there is no list of minor characters and he hasn't yet made any edit to the Manual to this day), he took it personally and asked for Hfc2x's demotion.

As with the previous point, this reaction seems to be exaggerated for a matter that, again, turned to his favor, and where again, no rule was broken.

The fact that Hfc2x declared himself as semi-active and that he no longer wanted to be an admin actually calls into question whether he should continue in his position or not, but opening a thread to propose his demotion and then blocking for this reason also seems out of place.

It should be noted that right now there is another admin and bureaucrat in the Wiki besides me, Jo4n, who hasn't been online since July 2014, and nobody is asking for her demotion because, as far as I'm concerned, she is not someone who assumed the charges and then just left, she is actually an old user who earned her position for valuable actions, contributed to the Wiki for a long time and then, for reasons that only she knows, moved away from the site. However, her presence here doesn't interfere in any way, except for the fact that now more admins are needed to fill the gap; but her help is still welcome if she decides to return.

The same things could be said about Hfc2x, so trying to remove him, though valid, looks unnecessary.

The last point was actually the primary reason that PrelateZeratul proclaimed to ask for Hfc2x's demotion and blocking. He said that Hfc2x repeatedly attacked him, bullied him and insulted him. Though this could be really a serious violation worthy of a blocking if proved true, reading on it's revealed the small detail that such "abuse" and "harassment" (as he described it) was no more than comments on Twitter.

This fact alone invalidates the point completely. What happens on other sites doesn't concern to the Wiki. Someone doesn't bring to discussion with the community their personal issues with other people on other sites just because it happens that they are also users of the Wiki. The rules of the Wiki only apply to what happens on the Wiki, and no more.

Even so, I think I should point out that the reported "abuse" was no such thing. Hfc2x certainly talked down on PrelateZeratul in his Twitter account (as admitted by himself), but those comments were not made to him, but on him. He didn't even know that PrelateZeratul had found his Twitter account and was reading what he was writing. His profile was private, and he wrote his comments indirectly, referring to PrelateZeratul by another nickname. I don't know how this could qualify as "abuse", "harassment" or "bullying".

In conclusion, we had a case supported by two points with weak bases and a third that not even concerned here. Why was that discussion initiated in the first place?

Making matters worse, that case was run in a way that, despite PrelateZeratul declared it was how the Wikia staff instructed him, I seriously doubt it (especially when NeoSuperior contradicted him after his own conversation with the staff), as I can only describe it as manipulative and tendentious.

He literally posted his own version of the events and immediately opened a poll to decide the case without giving time to the other person to defend themselves before making people vote, and without even telling them what was happening. I don't know how he could consider that any result derived from a discussion led in that way could be accepted as fair and objective.

But he did this not just that time, but all three cases were made in the same way, and he continued to defend that method after the complaints from other users about its lack of objectivity.

Furthermore, if you look at those polls you'll see that the first three voters are always the same, the accuser plus JinxTheFunhouse and Do1ball. They always side with PrelateZeratul, and giving the small number of users of the Wiki, the three together are always the majority in all polls. In the first and third case they were the 75% of the people that voted during the period of validity of the poll; in the second they were even the 100%.

This is not coincidence, as it was revealed during the third case that they are siblings. There is an evident conflict of interest there that yet again discredits the seriousness of any result obtained from any of those polls, but none of them found that worthy of mention until it it was discovered by a Wikia staff member that they share the same IP address (which means that they even live together), and PrelateZeratul was initially accused of sockpuppetry.

The matter becomes even more shady (if possible) when we realize that the two siblings registered on the Wiki in consecutive days, and only a few weeks before the first thread was opened, when they had already fulfilled the requirements of seniority and number of edits to vote.

What happened next doesn't need much explanation. Since Hfc2x had already expressed his desire to leave the Wiki, he didn't wait for the case against him to finish, and decided to retire by himself, but before leaving, he passed his bureaucratic rights to NeoSuperior. The latter then demoted PrelateZeratul from his admin position and blocked him for posting private Skype conversations, and since the accused was no longer in the Wiki, he closed the thread. PrelateZeratul believed that NeoSuperior had been "illegally" (he uses this word constantly) promoted as bureaucrat, that himself had been illegally demoted, and the thread illegally closed, so he contacted the Wikia staff asking for his unblock, and continued with the petition to block Hfc2x anyway, and also opening a new case now against NeoSuperior asking for his demotion and blocking too.

When we wonder if these events were actually illegal, the quick answer is yes, they were; at least if we define illegal as something that is not made as the rules say. However, I must mention that we are in a situation where the rules are no longer entirely useful. The user who wrote them, XGlass Reflection, didn't predict that something like this could happen when he created them.

The procedures for bureaucratship state that to be eligible as bureaucrat, a user must be an admin with at least 1300 edits, and it happens that the only user who fulfilled those requirements was PrelateZeratul, one of the people involved in the case and who was running what I consider as a shameful shadowing trial with the help of his fellows. Even if we look at the user list and filter it by number of edits in search for another candidate to promote as admin and then consider as bureaucrat, we find that the situation is the same. There are no more users in the Wiki who meet those requirements. The only users with more than 1000 edits are: Hfc2x, PrelateZeratul, two bots, two retired users and a blocked user.

According to these rules, we can't have any admin for a while. So it's not so difficult to understand why Hfc2x decided to pass his bureaucratic rights to NeoSuperior, the only other admin who was not involved in the situation, before leaving. The same could be said when NeoSuperior passed those rights to me and then left too.

I'm aware that I don't meet the requirements to be an admin, but when I came here, NeoSuperior had been offline for a week, the Wiki had become outdated and there were vandals plaguing the site with no one to stop them, so I presented my request anyway, because the circumstances probably warranted an exception. NeoSuperior believed the same and agreed.

Now that this responsibility has been entrusted to me, I just want to focus on what I consider the best course of action for the site.

Answering the requests of PrelateZeratul, I value him as a contributor, I respect his seniority, his constancy and his high number of edits. I'd like to work with him in projects to improve the site. However, I don't trust him to be granted the duties of being an admin and even less a bureaucrat.

He is evidently unable to put his personal issues aside from the Wiki issues; he tends to involve the community in those personal issues, even bringing that to questionable limits like to posting private information in a public source; he is not apparently aware of how to run a fair discussion, since he has repeatedly manipulated the process to his favor using the advantage that grants him the presence of his family members in the site; and he tends to take exaggerated measures like wanting to remove and block old members of the community for trivial reasons that in some cases not even compete to the Wiki.

But more than anything, he still believes that everything he has done is right and he certainly plans to continue acting in the same way. He probably hasn't yet realized that there is no rule that says that he can remove and block people for the reasons and methods he used, so everything he has done has also been "illegal".

For all these statements, I conclude that his demotion, regardless of the person who took care of it, was for valid reasons, since he has proven a lack of impartiality and the necessary judgment to continue as admin. In fact, I'm afraid of what could happen if he gets access to such a power again. Anyone who speaks ill of him in a social network would be likely subjected to a shady trial asking for their blocking in punishment for such "abuse". We will likely see a new case asking for my demotion and blocking for taking this decision anyway.

In the meantime, I'd like to continue with my work as best as I can. I'm considering making some changes to the requirements for choosing admins because this Wiki needs help now, and not until someone else reaches 1000 edits. But that will be discussed in another topic. 