User:65HCA7

There isn't one true overarching reason as to why I've ceased significant editing here on Wikipedia, but rather a culmination of factors that have all contributed to this decision over a period of several months.

My first concern is that most communication that occurs here is negative. 90% of the time when someone responds to your post somewhere or leaves a message on your user talk page, it's a criticism, admonition, or someone in some way finding fault on whatever it is you wrote. People rarely collaborate in positive ways as was originally intended or show appreciation of other editors; it's all "you're nuts!" or "screw yourself!" or quasi-civil attempts at saying these same things. It would be nice if there were more comments along the lines of "Hey, thanks for cleaning up the vandalism on this article I created," or even a "Merry Christmas" greeting from people sometimes, but it seems Wikipedia has been plagued by too much negativity to even acknowledge the existence of positives.

The second major thing that has driven me off the project is my attitude surrounding RfA, specifically the irreconcilable differences in opinion I seem to have compared to the herd community mentality. Basically all RfA is is a popularity contest, with a pinch of nitpicking and a dash of excessive concern with edit counts and other statistics. Unproven or even incompetent editors pass RfA all the time, with voters even going against precedent and their own standards just so that people they like pass and people they don't like fail. I posted a rant on the RfA talk page this past February detailing my frustrations regarding that; it can be found here. I struck my comments after an hour because I was getting flamed and didn't want to wind up blocked for something silly, but I personally still do believe every word I wrote there. What I call the "Kid With The Tools" archetype (users who register and immediately show unrealistically high levels of familiarity with Wikipedia anti-vandalism policies, using Twinkle, Huggle, and other automated toolsets as soon as possible, and racking up literally over a thousand edits within their first month) is what other users call the perfect admin candidate; gnomes who have several years' experience building the encyclopedia, fixing typos and minor errors, and stay out of trouble are given the cold shoulder or even the death glare at RfA.

I've also been noticing an increase in hostility levels, both direct and indirect, among members of the community as a whole but especially toward new editors. It was getting hard to fight vandalism because the abuse log was getting cluttered by silly filters that didn't serve much of a purpose and just made every edit by a new editor appear to be nonconstructive in some way (making it hard to sift through everything and actually find the true vandalism). The addition on 7 December 2017 of several tag filters that added little tags to rollbacks, redirect creations, and other relatively mundane edits didn't help my opinion of Wikipedia either, considering that I as a 2014 account had learned to associate tags and abuse filters with wrongdoing. Looking through my contributions and seeing long rows of tags on each of my edits makes me feel as though I'm a net negative, and I refuse to be part of a community that doesn't even respect its own active users or that makes them feel this way.

To top off everything, as someone with an interest in longevity-related matters, it pains me to see just how much controversy something as a few otherwise random really old people can cause. No, I don't feel that being a supercentenarian alone is enough to warrant an article; otherwise we'd have hundreds of articles about random barely-notable people hanging around here. But I do feel that being the oldest living person in the world is enough to satisfy the GNG, especially seeing as how the oldest living person in the world has been verified by independent scientific organisations and that such a topic is within the general public interest, as made evident by the extent of worldwide news coverage whenever the oldest living person dies. Recent AfD's of Chiyo Miyako and Kane Tanaka are showing a clear double standard and rather egregious examples of WP:IDONTLIKEIT supervotes, especially seeing as how many other supercentenarians such as Delma Kollar and Susie Gibson who both died younger than either of these and were never the oldest living person are allowed to keep articles without any sort of action being taken against them. The recent change in herd consensus (or, rather, the opinions of the cabal of People Who Call The Shots) is disconcerting to me and is only helping Wikipedia become incomplete and a joke in the eyes of myself and others. And no, I don't think the standard "reliable source" rule is enough for supercentenarian-related matters, as by those standards some random guy could bribe a major newspaper to say he was 120 years old, and if they wrote out a story about him saying he was 120 and provided a bunch of biographical information, it would be enough to get this guy included in longevity-related articles. For all we know, the non-GRG-validated people listed on List of oldest living people could very well be random 35-year-olds who just bribed "reliable sources" to write up a story about them. I will give a shoutout to User:Editorofthewiki; thank you very much for opening the Kane Tanaka deletion review so as to set the record straight. Yes, that is the thread that pushed me over the edge, but you are doing the part to try to counteract the rash of WP:IDONTLIKEIT supervotes in this category, and I appreciate that very much.

It also doesn't help that we seem to have a "block first, discuss later" attitude here, as can be seen with my "snake people" incident this past April on my user talk page. It was an innocent and unexpected mistake, and if the person who saw what happened had gone to my talk page and asked "dude, what the heck happened here?" he or she could have gotten a response within 10 hours, I could have apologised, and everything would have been fine. But no, I had to be given an indefinite block and thus as of this writing be on my second chance, with a nice skidmark on my record that diminishes my credibility across Wikipedia forever.

So in short, I feel as though 4.5 years of service and 4,611 edits is more than enough Wikipedia for me. If I see a typo, grammar mistake, or minor error, I'll fix it, but there's no way in heck I'm rejoining this community anytime soon. And it's better to retire when the cloud looming over your head is still a stratocumulus as opposed to a thick wall of cumulonimbus. 65HCA7 21:06, 17 August 2018 (UTC)