Gb gone?, An admin vanishes? Options

[carbuncle]

I can't recall why I had Gb's talk page on my watchlist in the first place, but I see that it was deleted per user request. From Gb's logs, it looks like they're quietly disappearing.

Not very interesting in and of itself, but I thought I'd add it to the pool of recent admin disappearances.

[Alex]

Who the hell is Gb, and why should we care if he/she retired?

[LaraLove]

Who the hell is Gb, and why should we care if he/she retired?

So you don't care if you know them and you don't care if you don't. You just don't give a damn when anyone leaves. We get it Alex. Go away.

Anyway, I've never heard of Gb. Do we know where he stood on the BLP issue?

[Somey]

Anyway, I've never heard of Gb. Do we know where he stood on the BLP issue?

Like Shalom says, I think we know that he didn't stand on the BLP issue at all, one way or another.

Gb (T-C-L-K-R-D) is actually a classic case of admin campaigning. If you look at his earliest contribs, there are about four or five spread out over roughly 3 months in 2007, followed by a sudden burst of admin-chore activity starting on April 24, 2007 - which he kept up on an almost-daily basis, until just recently. There are hardly any substantive content-adds whatsoever, for two whole years. He passed his RfA in February 2008, with only four opposes, all of which mentioned his lack of "mainspace activity."

As it turns out, he was editing under a different name, Gilesbennett (T-C-L-K-R-D) (still shown on the RfA page - if Wikipedia redacts the name, we'll do the same), prior to starting the "Gb" account. And if I'm not mistaken, he got our own Ms. Webb to blank his previous account's user pages. Whether or not people accepted the story that he made more mainspace edits under the previous account is anyone's guess, but right now that account shows only two contribs.

[CharlotteWebb]

As it turns out, he was editing under a different name, Gilesbennett (T-C-L-K-R-D) (still shown on the RfA page - if Wikipedia redacts the name, we'll do the same), prior to starting the "Gb" account. And if I'm not mistaken, he got our own Ms. Webb to blank his previous account's user pages. Whether or not people accepted the story that he made more mainspace edits under the previous account is anyone's guess, but right now that account shows only two contribs.

No, I did that of my own volition. I had never interacted with Gb before and haven't since. I removed his full name because I figured the abbreviation was due to privacy concerns so I checked the requests for changing username page and found out I was right. [1]

When the account is renamed all the edits are re-attributed to the new name. Sometimes the context makes this obvious (see [2], [3]). I think if more people really thought about it they'd rather forfeit their edit count and start a new unconnectable account.

Maybe that's what he's doing now, who knows...

He registered in February 2007 as Gilesbennett but was renamed to Gb in February 2008. Then he re-registered a second account named Gilesbennett and used it solely to request deletion of the redirect between his old and new name. The two edits you see under the old name are related to this. Then he passed RFA later that month. [4][5]

This post has been edited by CharlotteWebb: