Guild Wars Wiki talk:Elections/2009-02 bureaucrat election/Auron

"I'm no longer supporting anything ANet does from as powerful a position as bureaucrat." wut... -- Brains12 \ talk 21:50, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

bcrat has powers? :-/ poke | talk 21:55, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

bcrat has an implication of powah to the not-aware masses. That's why he got all alot of those no votes last election.--Riddle 23:20, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

More to the point, what's ArenaNet got to do with anything? How does being a bureaucrat imply support for ArenaNet? Since when has Auron supported anything that ArenaNet has done from any position, and since when has any position implied any kind of support or opposition to ArenaNet's actions? In which reality is a bureaucrat more 'powerful' (in the day-to-day sense.. heck, even in the month-to-month sense) than a sysop, as he is currently? Sorry, I'm just baffled by that declination statement... -- Brains12 \ talk 00:31, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Serving in any position is a sign of support of ANet. Contributing to the wiki is a sign of support of ANet. Sometimes I wonder why I post here at all.

I'm not sure you remember, but when this wiki was founded the bureaucrats worked every week with members of ArenaNet - Cory and Mike and Gaile talked and exchanged emails constantly about the state of the wiki, on top of their wiki posts. Bureaucrats are the ANet-appointed representatives to the wiki - even though they are chosen by those who know them best (the wiki users), they still must be approved by ANet via the actual promotion process. Unfortunately, meaningful interaction between the bureaucrats and ArenaNet has dropped to almost nothing - and it shows. Huge sections like skill feedback pop up and take weeks or months to quell, and honestly, making a user-based suggestion link page is a stupid idea, but it's the best one the community alone could come up with. If the bureaucrats had been in touch with ANet the way they were in the past, we may very well have gotten a more official "yes we'll use them" or "delete them they're useless" answer.

Bcrats do have powers, poke. Most bureaucrats we've have had were powerful individuals by nature, and that is what got them into the position - but the position has powers of its own. I don't believe I can do anything but badmouth ANet for their constant unending failure - doing any less would betray my conviction. Someone with the goal and mission to point out ANet's shortcomings should not be in a position like bureaucrat on this official wiki, as the bureaucrat role is a projection of ANet's will - or should be, anyway, since ANet entrusts them with the care of the wiki administration.

Why now? A few months ago, I really didn't care. I kept hoping that they would improve. I kept hoping that maybe they were taking steps in the right direction. Firing gaile, for example, was a pretty awesome idea. It wasn't until recently that I figured out they just replaced her with someone equally bad; bad in mostly the same ways. Neither one of them tried to really connect with the community - the entire community, including the PvP side. That lack of communication has led to a ton of bad changes, but I could write essays on each of them so I'm really not going to get into it here.

tl;dr anet sucks and i don't feel like serving in a position that requires anet's assistance to get there. -Auron 14:42, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

I started here way after the wiki was set up, but I've read over the initial discussions - stuff like the early policy discussions (and the mailing list discussion), (the important stuff on) Gaile's talk page, and the main page's talk. From those discussions, yes, I could see how the bureaucrat role was involved with ArenaNet.. but as you said yourself, that's not the case now. People who know what they're talking about realise that and the people who don't are the people who think any type of admin is involved with Anet somehow (and we should be, and are, teaching those people that that's not the case).

Your line of reasoning seems to be based on what the bureaucrat role used to be - the reality at the moment is that bureaucrats, sysops, and users aren't involved with ArenaNet. The community administration and ArenaNet might have been closely involved with each other before, but there's no longer a mailing list, and there aren't phone calls or personal meetings with Gaile or Mike to discuss the future of the wiki. Everything's done on the wiki itself (unless I've been seriously excluded from something!), meaning anyone can contribute to ArenaNet-wiki 'relations'. We've even taken out that part in the election policy that said to defer to ArenaNet's opinion if the community can't decide by itself a new bureaucrat. Even before that, it wasn't used often - we somehow managed to do it ourselves. You said yourself that the powerful individuals get put into the position, not the other way around, which implies 'powerful individuals' don't get that initial 'power' from the bureaucrat role but from themselves. If that's the case, and assuming what I said about everything being on-wiki is true, the bureaucrat role doesn't have any power in regards to ArenaNet-wiki relations in and of itself, and to be a bureaucrat isn't to support the actions ArenaNet takes in-game.

I honestly think you're misunderstanding the role of bureaucrat here, which baffles me as I previously thought that you were one of the few who did understand it. -- Brains12 \ talk 18:11, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

We simply disagree on how bureaucrats are supposed to act. I think bureaucrats, given the setup and the history of the site, should be working with ANet constantly to help improve the wiki and brainstorm ideas. We haven't done that in a long time, which is a mistake. It stopped partly because gaile left and ofc reggie isn't going to do anything of the sort, and partly because we forgot.

Either way, it's irrelevant to my last point. -Auron 08:58, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Damnit, this means I worked on getting 100 contribs on all my socks to stack the votes in Auron's favour for NOTHING! NOTHING! I hope you are happy Auron. Misery 17:02, 9 February 2009 (UTC)