From Meta:



He's unhappiness came to a head when an article he created was tagged for speedy deletion a minute after creation by a sockpuppet.
He says he will document his experience at the strategy task force on community health next week.

Shame, he could have sold that admin account.

Looking over the contribs for Mr. Sjc (T-C-L-K-R-D) , it looks like he's taken lengthy breaks before, most recently from Oct. 30, 2008 thru April 9, 2009, following what appears to have been a talk-page blanking on Aug. 8, 2008. However, I don't see anything that would have precipitated that reaction... In fact, the static he got over the Authonomy (T-H-L-K-D) article (which is hardly something they should be deleting) seems to have been a fairly isolated incident.

My guess is he just outgrew the place, and reached the point where he just needed a decent excuse to quit. Like Jimbo says, people will stop bothering when it stops being fun, and it's hard to imagine people having much fun on Wikipedia. (That's always been the case, but now it's a little more obvious than it was.)

I thnk the "stopped being fun" is the important aspect.

It stopped being fun when the reference police were given overarching powers. Before then, the reference was the trump card, but anyone could put anything they liked up. That meant that, in the world of how crowd sourcing was meant to work, someone could put their interesting snippet into an article, and then it would get knocked into shape. A sensible contribution would remain.

Now there is no incentive, in fact on a bad day a newbie will simply get banned for doing what they were asked to do - getting stuck in and adding their little piece to the sum of all human speculation.

Of course, although we now suspect that random editing by the human race does not result in a useful encyclopedia, what has been lost is a corrective mechanism to the sum of all human speculation being in the hands of a few misguided individuals, which is the net result of having the WikiStasi around. And clearly, being the WikiStasi is pretty disillusioning too, so a lose all round then.

Yep, it's been done an hour ago.

He has been there for eight and a half years... it's not like it didn't take long.