Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-24573226-20171007211457/@comment-24573226-20171010191540

Hi all. I know it’s been a few days, but I hope you pay attention to what I have to say. I spoke with Grif about the burden I feel with this denomination in play and he gave me the go ahead to speak honestly.

So, this is how I feel about things.

Support: My number one reason for supporting Grif’s removal from Bureaucrat is that he doesn’t want the position but can’t make himself leave. This has been the case for, based on conversational content, at least the last two years.

He has told me that it makes him “feel like a piece of shit to be honest” and how he “would have stepped down ages ago” except that he doesn’t feel anyone else is able to be ‘crat. “…there’s people who do 10x more work than me but they don’t currently have the leadership sort of things”.

Back in January, Grif gave me a story-filled rundown of the lack of proper merits in staff members. I was also told a story of an admin Grif once thought had the potential for becoming a bureaucrat. He had informed them of his intention to nominate them as soon as they proved to him that they were ready. This situation between the two of them was not known to the rest of the admins.

Even as Grif continued telling me this tale, it was clear that he had kept dangling the position of bureaucrat as a carrot to this other admin while continually judging their performance as a staff member, though Grif lacked the self-perception to realize this. Grif told me that in the end he didn’t post his write up nominating them because they started to ask when he would and he felt that they were copping an attitude and “taking a turn downwards”.

This particular conversation with Grif included some heavy hinting that he wanted me to be next, even though it was never outright mentioned. I’d hoped that I was misreading this particular undertone, but it was proven to be so when Nedz sought me out a day or two later. He wanted to confirm that I had told Grif I was ready to become the next admin, which I answered honestly had never been mentioned and that at the time I had too much going on to be interested.

Since January, though, I have looked at Grif as a person who doesn’t want to be where he is but can’t make himself let go. Other reasons for my deciding in favor of his removal come up when I take a look at what he’s done since I’ve come to the wiki.

As a Bureaucrat, it is true that Grif is hardly ever present. When he is, he can be helpful, but he occasionally also behaves in a manner that I personally don’t see as good for the wiki.

Primarily, Grif doesn’t particularly encourage growth and change, and will in fact block it. My first exposure to him relates to this, when I suggested on the Admin Request Board, after consulting with accessible staff, the need to split the image galleries due to lag. Grif resisted the logic for this and drew the decision out for several days despite agreement with it until finally a member of staff decided to just move forward with it.

This is consistent with happenings after Grif joined the staff Skype group I was a part of. I would bring to his attention concerns that were brought forward by users of the wiki only to simply have the addressing the issue be refused. An example of this was when SYUTK pointed out on the old TopNav that a drop menu located rightmost gets cut off and could easily be switched to a heading that did not have a drop menu. There was absolutely no reason not to make the switch so that the wiki functioned more smoothly for users who encounter that problem, but Grif said no.

Grif would also delay decisions based on the need for more staff input… even when several of us were present and in agreement. In other cases, when consensus was actually reached, Grif would backtrack the conversation into not actually having agreement so therefore we would do nothing. Most recently this happened more than once when we as a staff tried to address the “additional bureaucrat” issue.

Probably the most frustrated I ever personally got with Grif’s approach to the wiki was when I had to have an extended discussion with him arguing my case about why a comment about assaulting a character via her arse needed to be removed. Grif finally agreed to edit the comment after I provided examples of when similar comments had been removed in the past.

Finding the conversation now recalls to me that it went down like this: He agreed to its removal when he saw “I was bothered by it”, but when he realized that as a rollback I couldn’t remove comments myself, and therefore hadn’t been given the rights to make the call to be bothered by a comment, he said it was going to stay. Even though we didn’t know each other at that time, he went so far as to insinuate that I was trying to ask for a personal favor of him to remove the comment and he wouldn’t “do it for me any more than he’d ban a person from chat for a random user”. I was completely flummoxed by this response to pointing out an inappropriate comment. I recall now that this situation had left me so upset at the notion that even keeping the wiki clean would require battles in which validity depended on your ranking in staff that I strongly considered quitting. There have also been times when Grif disregards staff agreement in favor of his own opinion. An example would be toward the end of Volume 4, months into our established rhythm of consult-and-do, the absent Grif decided he didn’t like one of our decisions on a profile pic and came into the group chat to make us change it, disregarding that it had been one of many group votes. A profile pic may have been too small to fight over, but it felt very disrespectful to those of us who had been doing the work all along.

In the capacity of an administrator, Grif has some merit. He’s taken screenshots when others couldn’t. Since the move to Discord, when staff discussions are happening and he’s around he’ll participate.

As a bureaucrat, though, when Grif puts himself down as “pretty fucking useless as it is”, it’s healthier for Grif, the rest of staff, and the wiki that he no longer be in that role.