Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship/Lofty abyss

The following discussion is preserved as an archive of a successful permissions request. Please do not modify it.

Closed as Demoted -- Enfcer (talk) 20:12, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Lofty abyss

Lofty abyss (talk · contribs · count)

End date: 17:25, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello there,

I'm requesting that Lofty abyss have their adminship removed here. The reason of this is due to very long-term inactivity.

As many of you will be aware, we have an inactive admins policy here. The main idea of this policy is that if you make less than 100 edits in a calendar year (from January to December), your admin will be removed and if you don't make any edits at all for a year, your admin will be removed. However, the option of using RfdA to remove administrators who gamed this system was always left open, which is why I'm here today. This inactivity policy exists so admins continue to be familiar with policy. If they are inactive then they may have issues with new policies. They need to be around so they know the policies well.

As you can see from their yearly edit counts, since 2012, Lofty abyss has made around 100 edits or less each and every year, with the notable exception of 2019, the year which they lost their stewardship for inactivity. As you can see from Lofty abyss' most recent contributions, a majority of them were made using AWB, and also made on Christmas Day or the days after. They got to 108 changes in 2021 according to XTools, just over the 100 change minimum. I don't think anyone would particularly care if this was a one-time occurrence. However, this appears to be a pattern, doing the bare minimum just to keep the admin and CU hats, and this has gone on for 9-10 years. It is also disappointing that despite the fact Lofty abyss made around 75 edits in a week, they have not made a single edit in 2022 – and this shows that they are definitely gaming the system. Not to mention the fact that all of Lofty abyss' edits in 2021 made through AWB were exclusively typo fixing, which as you can see at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage and in the archives there, is not allowed here.

So, in conclusion, they have gamed the inactivity policy and they have also seemed to have forgotten the AWB rules we have here. And from the recent levels of activity, it appears they are not interested in being an active – or even semi-active – part of our community. Personally, if this RfdA succeeds, I have no problem with them running in the future if they have sustained activity here and they are active in their other roles too.

Thank you for your time, --Ferien (talk) 17:25, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Support

1. Support Has a track record of hat collecting and not using the tools on not just this wiki but on others as well such as commons and even a Stewardship. Has been gaming the system for a number of years now and its time to finally end it. -Djsasso (talk) 17:46, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
2. Support After much thought, I have decided to lean towards supporting this request. While lofty's years of service are always appreciated, it is apparent that they are only active to keep their tools. This is displayed by the inactivity throughout the year and a burst of automatic/semi-automatic edits at the end of the year. Minimum criteria are not the standard for activity and it is just a means for automatic removal of the flag without going through deadminship proposal. Based on what I have seen from them here and elsewhere, I don't think they intend to go beyond the minimum in the coming years. However, if they display a certain level of constant activity in the coming years, I will be more than happy to support a new RFA, should they decide to run again. Thanks --BRP ^ever 01:06, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
3. Support Removal For me, the proverbial coffin nail was using automated edits to up their edit count while, at the same time, breaching community expectations and appropriate uses of AWB on this project. Additionally, as a functionary, Lofty's CU tool use count for 2021 was in the single digits at 8 total checks. Per Djsasso said, it's time for the games to end. I have every expectation Lofty will claim ignorance of policy, extenuating circumstances, and wikilawyer any cited concerns brought by members of this community, quite similar to what happened when they were removed as a Steward. I truly hope Lofty turns their behavior around and becomes an active community member again soon. Unfortunately, semi-automated edits all in the final weeks of 2021 just won't do. Operator873 ^connect 03:40, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
4. Support removal people who are not active members of this community should not be administrators. --IWI (talk) 04:54, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
5. Support – Never seen them around. Hulged (talk) 18:02, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
6. Support per others. Minorax (talk) 07:03, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
7. Support I've been thinking about this for some time now. Even now I'm a little unsure, however I think this is the way we need to go. My initial gut feeling was to oppose. While to me, it felt pretty obvious what was happening when I saw the AWB edits start to roll in at the 11th hour, there isn't a policy against that. I'm not even sure it is really "gaming the system". It's within the system completely, however it probably isn't in the spirit of the rules. So, I was thinking I had to oppose until we somehow changed the inactive admin policy to make the system more robust. I still think updating the policy would be a good idea, however I realized that isn't really the discussion here. I think you need to step back and think "Would I support Lofty abyss if they were at RfA today?", and the answer would be no, based on activity. Lofty really hasn't been active since 2010, where they had 775 changes. If somebody applied for the admin tools with 775 changes I think we'd unanimously say no, and that was over a decade ago. So, it is just time. --Gordonrox24 | ^Talk 04:40, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
8. Just noticed this. Yes, more hat collecting yet again. In particular m:Steward_requests/Global_permissions/2020-10#Global_sysop_for_Lofty_abyss and then later m:/Stewards/Elections_2021/Votes/Lofty_abyss. How on Earth could you fail a request for global sysop then 3 months later pass a request for stewardship? Naleksuh (talk) 20:45, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
9. Support essentially inactive --DannyS712 (talk) 16:36, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
10. Support per others and nom. Inactive admins pose a security risk. --SHB2000 (talk) 02:56, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Conditional oppose Just blew in from IRC where I developed an opinion before reading the rest of this thread.

   I think we should acknowledge a few things. 1) Lofty didn't break any rules. 2) Ferien also isn't breaking any rules by starting thsi de-adminification discussion. If an admin didn't break any rules, it can still be okay to remove adminship. 3) There are two practical issues at hand a) eleven months of inactivity means that the SEWP community could have made a really big change of some kind and Lofty wouldn't have known about it the way an admin should and b) perhaps because of the rush to get things in under deadline, the quality of the 100 changes Lofty made here on SEWP may have been poor. 4) 2020 and 2021 were really weird years worldwide which probably affected the ability of many editors to contribute to Wikis. 5) What I'm seeing here on this thread that I didn't get in IRC was that Lofty has done this for many years in a row, to going back before the coronavirus pandemic. This supports the claims of hat collecting.

   Loftyabyss, can you make a promise to us here at Simple that, in 2022, you will at least spread out your 100 edits across all twelve months so that you will keep in touch with the community? That way you would be far more likely to hear about any important changes and would not feel the pressure to use tools in ways that other editors here clearly believe are not good. (I'm not weighing in on whether they're right at this time.) You've got a nine-year pattern. Do you want to break it? Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:38, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Comments

I'm sorry, but is AWB supposed to not be used? What's the difference between a manual typo fix, and one found using regex? I'm also not sure what you mean by it not being allowed? I might be misremembering, but I'm more certain than not that I asked for that a decade ago, but I could always ask again now if it's needed again (someone could have informed me on my talk page). And last year I used the tools close to 50 times, should it be 100s, 1000s otherwise? Surely my usage shows I am still using the buttons... -- Lofty abyss 17:27, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

No the first rule of AWB is not to use to just fix typos. The reason is that AWB can't determine on its own if the spelling is correct in the usage that is being used. It often changes the spelling of words that were not wrong for the context they were being used in. As for looking at your usage history, you almost never use them. You have very rarely used them since you received them. You only show up at the end of every year to make just enough edits to not have your tools removed. In fact one year you did just enough on Dec 31st to hit exactly 100 which made it pretty obvious you were just gaming the system. You may not remember but back when you first asked for the flags you told a number of us that you only wanted the flags so you could run for Steward. It has been clear for years that you never actually intended to be active here and were just collecting flags. -Djsasso (talk) 17:44, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I certainly do very much read the entire page when they're loaded... not sure if you're implying I just save every edit (I'd otherwise have thousands). That's proven in the mismatched edit summaries... often I fix other typos too. And I'm not sure about the latter, as that is long in the past and I still remained to edit here. I certainly am not the most active, but surely not only the most active are needed... -- Lofty abyss 18:06, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Only editing for a for the most part in a brief period of at the end of December isn't "not the most active" it is effectively completely inactive. To be an admin, the requirement is being active. -Djsasso (talk) 18:09, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Sure, I guess, inactive in comparison to 10k a day or something, if that was possible... but yet again, I don't understand why this is a necessity on volunteer projects... they're already generally becoming less active on average, overall... should that process be accelerated by only having the most active, until they can necessarily no longer be active? -- Lofty abyss 18:14, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, admins need to be active because they have to be current on the current policies and the current culture on the wiki. Admins who are not active either forget the policy they knew or don't know current policy. A perfect example was demonstrated by you using AWB solely to fix typos. We don't require editors to have any activity requirement. But admins need activity so they are current on policy and because inactive accounts on a wiki with elevated permissions is a security risk. -Djsasso (talk) 18:16, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

If you need to verify whether they're current then surely a test for that would be a better alternative than throwing the baby with the bathwater, per se... and I'm not sure how AWB can't be used to fix typos... not much else to do with it, besides cosmetic changes (which are the ones that IMO shouldn't be done on their own)... and I did often save edits with typo fixes, and cosmetic changes... -- Lofty abyss 18:20, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

You may be making other good cosmetic changes to the page whilst correcting those typos, but AWB shouldn't be used to correct those typos in the first place. --Ferien (talk) 21:48, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

•  Comment: I am just a little puzzled about this speedy here, we do not have a QD saying "no meaningful content or history", the 1st part can be A1, but history doesn't fit in. I wonder would it be better if the reasons can be using the standard QD reasons. Thanks. Camouflaged Mirage (talk) 09:05, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

  It would indeed be useful if the nuke function had prefilled templates, but I'm not sure what you mean about history not fitting in (it's some sexual nonsense likely done by a bot, so I assume "no meaningful content or history" fits...) -- Lofty abyss 19:52, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

  In the case given it was the usual sex-related graffitti, might have been deleted as Vandalism, Test page, no meaning, or several other reasons. It was a clear case, I think pretty much any other admin would have done the same.--Eptalon (talk) 19:58, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

  QD reasons: G1, A1, for example...--Eptalon (talk) 20:01, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

  Sorry I am unclear. I mean that I will think that it's best to at least state the criterion for deletion as some users that are new will then have some guidance on why their page isn't acceptable. I didn't know this is done via nuke, and the user is a serial vandal, this might then be acceptable. In general, I mean that in QD there isn't mention of history, except for user requested deletion etc, hence I will think that this might be confusing to users seeing why no meaningful history is a valid deletion reason. Of course this refers to good faith users. Yeah nuke should have the option to use prefilled reasons, that might be worth a wishlist survey item?. Camouflaged Mirage (talk) 09:38, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

  I usually use links to criteria in most cases, and yeah, it would be useful if that was possible. -- Lofty abyss 20:28, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

  The nuke command does let you edit your own summaries.... -Djsasso (talk) 20:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

  It allows summaries, just not the usual drop-down templated ones we have in Special:Delete, which I think is part of the issue here. Vermont (talk) 02:13, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

The above adminship discussion is preserved as an archive of the discussion. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the talk page of either this nomination or the nominated user). No further edits should be made to this page.