User:Graham87/Personal Wikipedia timeline/How I lost my adminship

I lost my adminship, in short, through a combination of bad blocks, a bit of bad luck, a bad watchlist, and a bad brain. More details below. If you think I've said too much, feel free to either let me know or edit this page accordingly. This page is blocked from search engine indexing, unlike my main personal Wikipedia timeline.

2023

• 28 December: I indefinitely blocked the user Rager7 as an unresponsive/disruptive editor. They came to my attention with this edit on my watchlist which violated the overlinking guideline to the article I created about the Paralympic athlete John Kestel; its edit summary mentioned linking a nationality, something you don't do here, which didn't help matters either. I gave them no warning before blocking them, which I now realise was extremely harsh. Over the years, due to a series of bad experiences that I won't write about in detail, I became increasingly paranoid about high-volume new editors, among other types of users.

2024

• 24 August: After being asked by another admin for my input on Rager7's unblock request, I expressed dissatisfaction with it, so they were not unblocked at the time. I didn't realise that such unblock requests by admins patrolling the {{unblock}} queue should usually be granted unless there is a very good reason not to do so.
• 25 August: I encountered the editor Hocikre, who had added superfluous headings to over a thousand articles, on my watchlist when they edited the article about the Irish writer Eileen O'Casey. I undid most of their edits and indefinitely blocked them without warning due to their edit volume, which I should not have done. An admin declined their unblock request a day later, but another user who disagreed with Hocikre's block took it to administrative action review on 27 August. That discussion also mentioned my recent block of Rager7 and I undid both of those blocks due to overwhelming consensus there.
• 11 September: I was still monitoring Rager7's edits at this stage and reblocked them after actions stemming from this redirect discussion. I was asked to unblock them (outside the unblock requests process) four days later and refused to do so, leading to an Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents (ANI) thread entitled "Overzealous blocking by Graham87", in which I realised my second block of Rager7 was also way over-the-top and therefore undid it.
• 25–26 September: In response to the above-mentioned ANI thread, an admin reviewed my recent blocks as noted in this conversation and unilaterally shortened or undid some of them (this is a highly unusual action and shows how far some of my blocking practices had fallen out of line with community norms). Unsatisfied with my response in the above-linked discussion, this admin started another ANI thread about me entitled "Inappropriate blocks and WP:BITE by Graham87", on which I received further strong advice.
• 27 October: While I was sleeping, an admin recall petition was started against me, the first one ever, just a day after that page was made into an official policy. By the time I got to the petition, it looked like this; also see my initial response to it on my talk page. The initial filer tried to withdraw it (after I'd signed off for the night) but this was reversed as out-of-process. Shortly after my recall petition had begun, I made a half-serious analogy comparing administrative recall to Chinese water torture and any request for adminship to stoning; this turned out to be right in my case.
• 5 November (my local time): The petition had received 12 out of the needed 25 signatures, but this was about to change rapidly after my block of Mariewan that day. I encountered this user through an edit on my watchlist to the Sleepover article which added a reference that did not at all match the article text; there were other problems with this user's edits (more than 200 of them), including attempted copyediting that was not always successful, overlinking, and probably most damaging of all, reference replacement (though I'd instinctively viewed all forms of damage to Wikipedia as equally severe, which informed my block of this user). Much ink has been metaphorically spilt about what I did next, including blocking them after warning them over a remarkably trivial thing (contravening our guideline about citations in the lead section, which is often ignored by many editors for many reasons); again, the fact that they mentioned adding citations to the lead in their edit summaries didn't help either. All the gory details are on this user's talk page and my contributions at the time, including the seven hours or so I spent cleaning up this user's edits. If I could redo that day, I would have either reported this user to a noticeboard instead of blocking them (as I mentioned in this comment at the recall) or maybe temporarily blocked them (after a couple of warnings) due to their reference replacement, along with emphasising how damaging that aspect of their editing pattern is to the site. I indefinitely blocked Mariewan in the middle of my admin recall because I was consumed by dealing with their edits; the recall may as well have not existed during that time. Even when I noticed edits to the recall on my watchlist on the night (my time) I blocked Mariewan, I didn't even think for a second that my block of Mariewan would affect the recall; they were two completely separate things in my head. If I'd been undergoing a re-request for adminship procedure (RRFA) at the time, which could have been an option, I don't think that would've disappeared in my mind so easily, because an RRFA would have been much more active than the recall. Before the two ANI discussions mentioned above, I would have blocked that user without warning, no questions asked. In the UK and other places, 5 November is Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the Gunpowder Plot; I didn't intend to throw gunpowder on my admin recall by blocking Mariewan but that's what I ended up doing.
• 6 November: My block of Mariewan was universally panned; I reversed it and that user hasn't edited since. I won't lie; I think the encyclopedia is better off without Mariewan's previous editing pattern, but we don't know what they could have potentially contributed here. Even by the time I'd gotten up, the number of signatures on my recall petition had shot up from 12 to 21. By the time it was closed it had reached 27 signatures. I asked what to do next on the petition's talk page, a relevant bureaucrats' noticeboard thread was opened on my behalf, and the recall petition was closed. I had the option of resigning my adminship or going for a re-request for adminship to try to hold on to it; I chose the latter because I thought I might have a chance of retaining my admin status. I was wrong
• 8 November: After much soul-searching, I realised that the reason that I'd gotten in to so many sticky situations was that my watchlist contained far too many pages that didn't interest me, so I spent most of that day doing a watchlist purge, my first since October 2007. At first I saw my watchlist purge as a dereliction of duty but later I saw it more as liberation. By then I also realised that, for my adminship request to have a hope of succeeding, I should pledge to avoid blocking. I spent the next week or so gathering nominators, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.
• 17 November: my re-request for adminship went live. Unlike a normal RFA whose threshold is 70%, this one was to have a passing threshold of 60% with any result between 50 and 60% up for bureaucrat discretion. By the time I'd signed off that night, it was at 42/5/2, so I was feeling pretty optimistic.
• 18 November, by the time I'd answered my latest batch of questions, my RRFA was at 67/33/5. Not as good as the night before, but still not the end of the world.
• 19 November: By the time I'd surfaced, we were at 105/109/7 with rumblings about withdrawing. We were below the 50% cutoff that meant failure. I'd earlier decided to withdraw at 45% (but didn't want to make the exact figure public at the time). I held on to hope that maybe things would turn around.
• 20 November (local time): The day I withdrew my RFA. At the start we were at 115/131/9 by the time I got up, not much different from 111/124/8 the night before, so I kept on holding on. After getting back from the gym later that day, the RRFA looked something like this, with a discussion of another harsh block I'd made and a very long oppose that gave me pause. I then spent a few hours thinking about what to do before I finally withdrew the RFA, gave myself some user rights that I'd need later (but avoided giving myself rollback because some people in my RFA objected to my use of that right), and let the bureaucrats know. An RFC was started later that day to allow non-admin importers (I'm the only one) to be able to history-merge pages and it was implemented nearly a week later.
• 24 December (UTC): An opinion piece for the Wikipedia Signpost I wrote about my adminship saga was published.