Jalen Folf 🔜 FWA, Furality Sylva, & Megaplex · @JalenFolf
25th Jan 2018 from TwitLonger
The truth about my retirement from Wikipedia
I'm sure some Wikipedians have been questioning my sudden retirement and subsequent disappearance from the English Wikipedia. This post will explain everything.
The stress of contributing and maintaining the English Wikipedia began around November, a few days before my first warning about misusing AIV (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jd22292&diff=811663240&oldid=811435187). Around this time, I was going through the stress of settling a multi-article content dispute surrounding genres on electronic music compilation albums (See edit histories between 19 and 20 November 2017 for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_League_x_Monstercat_Vol._1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstercat_Uncaged_Vol._3 and related articles). While I was lucky that the dispute settled rather quickly, the stress continued beyond those edits, which may have contributed to the warning.
Through December and January, while my second warning (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJd22292&type=revision&diff=813080492&oldid=812980347) helped the situation, it did not contribute to the continued stress and subsequent lack of motivation that anti-vandal and anti-sockpuppet work was giving me. Despite continued creation of new articles, I continuously found myself unmotivated to improve upon them. Soon enough, this demotivation leaked into my attempts to improve other articles and resolve other disputes, which eventually led to the recent WP:CIR warning and my subsequent retirement.
I am aware that since my retirement, some anonymous contributors have snuck onto articles I have created and vandalized them or reverted such vandalism. This is due to the fact that I am still watching these pages and still receive e-mails about edits to said pages. Why I have chosen to do this is purely because I want to see one of my wishes fulfilled, which I will describe in the next paragraph.
So what will happen with me going forward? Well, retirement from Wikipedia has opened a door to allow me to work harder on my YouTube channel, which Wikipedia has been dragging me away from since late June. The stress that I described earlier had been preventing me from finding enough moderation on the encyclopedia to allow me to focus on the channel. However, I still feel that despite my achievements in article creation, I have not finished my work. So I have two wishes for the Wikipedia community, particularly with the WikiProjects in which I was most involved with: Video games and Music. My first wish is to see the articles I have created continue to be improved and maintained. I am also aware that one of the IPs stalking me has been helpful with reference ideas on one of my creations; perhaps this wish can be fulfilled in this way? My second wish is to see subjects I wanted to write articles about created. Before my retirement, I have provided references for those subjects in respective locations: for video game subjects, I left them on WP:VGR under the January 2018 requests, while for music subjects, references are on each redirect's Talk page, with the exception of one. All related topics can be located on my user page (I wanted to remove "Better with Time" from this list after an IP vandalized the redirect, but a promise is a promise).
Despite the stress and lack of motivation that Wikipedia had given me, as well as several of my creations not living up to the encyclopedia's expectations, I'd like to thank my Talk page watchers and users I've interacted with during my time on the encyclopedia for being support during rough times. I really hope we can find room for communication off the project as well. 😃