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.

Well you missed the pool by a few feet.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showforum=84

Arguably it should be a sub-forum of "Editors" rather than "Bureaucracy".

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

Next you'll be suggesting that this is a pointless thread.

I think he is best known for threatening to block somebody during the edit war on Calton's user-page. I have no opinion on that but as far as I know it is the only context in which User:Gb has been mentioned on WR.

Feel free to move this thread into that sub-forum, friendly and helpful WR admins, although I'm not sure this counts as a retirement.


No one you know, and you shouldn't. Any other questions?

Gb was an ordinary admin, the kind you never hear about. He helped a lot at Suspected Sock Puppets when I was active there.

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?

No opinion. Last 1,000 Wikipedia-space pages include zero with the word "biogra___" in the title. Less than 50 Wikipedia talk edits, also with none relating to biographies.

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.

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]

I know I would! Anyway, thanks, that explains it - I'm always getting fooled by the renamings.

So... I wonder if he would have passed his RfA so easily if more people had looked closely at his contribs? I mean, even early on, there's practically nothing substantive there whatsoever. It makes little sense (to me, anyway) that someone would do all that scut-work on WP without at least one or two topic areas that they're interested in maintaining, protecting, or owning, even if he didn't write (m)any actual articles. But unless I'm totally missing it, he doesn't seem to have had even that. I know such people exist, of course... How common is that? Every time I see it, it makes me sort of sad, like when I meet someone who clearly has no goal or direction in life.

I can only hope that his withdrawal from WP is the result of his having found a higher (or at least more personally rewarding) calling...

Hard to say. I didn't look at his edits as I didn't have any intention of voting in the RFA. I just saw where the nominator (probably not the think-before-you-post type) referred to Gb by his full name when he had just had it shortened to his initials for privacy reasons.

Mind you this was fairly soon after an (admittedly vacated) arbcom case where six members unanimously opined that that sort of thing isn't cool. I have widely mixed views about the user involved in this case (both of them actually) but I would have removed his former username too if he was in the same situation.


Well everyone has a direction at any given time but it's common enough to have no net direction, and by that I don't mean on the intarwebs (necessarily).