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Heh. Coming up for a year now - nine months or so to be more precise - since I made my last actual edit (not quite true - I've made something like five or so as an anon, but only when I've been referencing a page and seen a glaring inaccuracy). I didn't say anything at the time, because big dramatic farewells just strike me as stupid. Nine months or so down the line though, I don't think a farewell note can be described as "big" or "dramatic", and nor am I likely to backslide the way I thought I would at first.

In short - I'd had enough. Not of the actual editing itself, but of the stuff that came with it more and more. The single biggest problem I had was with the "gearing" in votes, best illustrated in my experience with the mess at Shikari, where one editor (whose username I no longer recall), decided that the dicdef of a Hindi word was more important than the comics-related page that was there. At first he stuck a big block of text at the top of the page, and when I moved the mention that it was a Hindi word to something like a "Notes" section (I'm not checking the details of any of this, it's not worth it), he then (some time later, while I was away from the Wiki) moved the page, and edited the redirect. And, when you have a small number of editors on a page, two or three objections made it impossible to get the page moved back. The increasing scope of the fiction guidelines - especially in one particular direction - bugged me a hellavalot as well. None of this individually stopped me - I was editing for a couple of months or so after the Shikari thing, and a similar amount of time after the guidelines (the name of the page I forget, it wasn't [the page then known as?] WP:FICT). It was just one realisation:

It wasn't fun anymore. Editing increasingly wasn't a hobby, it was a job. And I didn't want to do a job in my relaxation time.

[This shouldn't be tied in with the "Ignore All Rules" hate I mentioned on my RfA - which also wasn't the reason I left, since I mention it, it was four or five months earlier - that was mostly about the inflammatory page title.]

Maybe things have changed since, I don't know, but even now I'm kind of ambivalent about WP itself. I still edit wikis - just smaller, more focused wikis (I'm even an admin on one), where there's only a small number of editors and so move wars, perspective wars, and just edit wars in general only happen once in a blue moon. It's still fun to fill out stuff you know and are interested in, it's not fun to have someone come along and cut you down over it - because they don't think comics and suchlike don't deserve a place on Wikipedia, or just because they're utter bastards.

And no, of course not everyone I interacted with did that, or was that. I won't name names either way, but if anyone reads this, I'd hope they know what side of the fence they fall on.

Will I ever become an active editor here again? Never say never - one thing I've learned from seeing the odd Big Dramatic Farewell is that saying "I'll Never Be Back" is asking for humiliation. I don't see it happening though. Not in a hurry anyway.

Maybe someday... - [[User:SoM|SoM]] 04:53, 23 March 2007 (UTC)