User:Pfctdayelise/Adminship
I think it's time for me to give up the bit.
Since the start of the year my edits have dropped dramatically. More importantly, I don't keep up with the community noticeboards. The truth is, I have not really been an admin here for months. This is just the formal acknowledgement of that.
This community deserves active admins. If my activity picks up significantly in the future, I will re-request adminship, but I don't really see that happening; I think I am going to be more involved with Wikimedia Australia and hopefully some tech-y things. Some of which are definitely relevant to Commons. :)
I see good people around these parts, and it makes me proud -- like a grandparent. Which is pretty funny. But I guess two years is like two generations in wiki-time, so maybe it's appropriate. I hope that I was able to influence the attitudes of people here, and this project, in a positive way. I hope they continue. I currently see no reason they won't.
Truthfully, Commons adminship has been more useful to me for off-wiki reasons than on-wiki reasons for a little while now. I was able to use it to express with some authority, the wishes or opinions of the Commons community. I mostly tried to do this when advocating for tech features and on bugs reports. I also think it was very useful to be a person that others could say, "Oh, if you want to know anything about Commons, talk to her." If someone wanted to know some kind of person to contact, or where or how to do something in Commons, I could give them advice. I could judge if the Commons community would like some idea or feature. I think that was really useful because otherwise, with this really flat community structure, there is no obvious spokesperson. Having a spokeperson, an advocate, can be a great thing. So by giving up adminship I am admitting that it's not appropriate for me to be that person anymore. I hope others will step up to the plate.
If you've been an admin here for six or nine months, you should probably consider that if you speak with authority, no one's going to contradict you. So if you can do some good, by speaking authoritatively, consider it. Be a leader. I think wikis as a tool don't really encourage leadership, but you don't know how helpful it might end up being.
The number of things I have learned of via Commons is truly incredible. When I first came here I wouldn't have even known what an SVG was. When I think about all the amazing things I have learned, and all the wonderful people I have got to know, I can hardly believe it. I hope I can meet more of you at Wikimanias or other events around the world. I have loved working with most of you because you care. If I disagreed or agreeed with you, I respected you because you cared. It is so easy to think about how impossibly big the job is, and how little a difference we can make at a time. But here we are with 3M and now likely to hit a new million at least once every year.
How far we have come, and yet...
I am disappointed that Commons is still missing so much functionality. I don't know what else we can do. I am really, really disappointed that the tech team is so uninterested in taking our requests into consideration.
Maybe we have to do something like this:
- Create prioritised list of feature requests/major reported bugs
- work out (with Brion et al if necessary) which ones can be "extensionised" and which ones must be core
- approach chapters to fund development of features which might be possible as extensions.
I still want to work on the Commons API, for example, and I'll still be doing PGIP...
Lots of 
. Please email me when something cool happens, I still want to blog about interesting Commons goings-on.
Brianna. 14:55, 10 August 2008 (UTC)