Given that I am (and have been) quite familiar with both Solacis and Garrixian personally for an extended time, as well as with the recent past issues over the Honkai verse, I would like to comment on this matter.
For full disclosure, in the event that it may be interpreted as a source of bias - I currently own a Discord server, namely The VSBW Axiom, which was first created by Solacis and which he transferred ownership to me. We are on quite good terms with each other at present, and have been for some time (though not always - that's a tangent for later), so I would feel remiss not to mention how this may influence my perspective while evaluating the report against him.
In the edits provided, Solacis linked to
this CRT as his explanation for the changes he made. As we can see, this CRT was never accepted - it received approval from 1 administrator and no moderators/bureaucrats. This is a simple violation of our rules on approval of CRTs:
What sticks out even more to me here than the additions and their discrepancies with the CRT is the dates. Solacis made the CRT on the
5th of April, and the first staff approval of the CRT was on the
15th of April. But Solacis applied the changes for the CRT on the
6th of April (all of these dates are within my time-zone, and may be different if you view the links in a different time-zone). I would be inclined not to think much of this in isolation, as these sorts of errors are usually due to ignorance/forgetfulness of the rules. However, the response by Solacis above indicates to me that he was aware that he was making a rule violation, and that he made it out of impatience. And beyond that, Solacis has done enough content revision work in the past for me to not believe he was simply forgetful about the requirements in this instance. As far as I can tell, these CRT changes were applied before any staff approval had been received and while still in the grace period, despite awareness that this was against the rules.
I feel I should add that I don't think this was intended to be an act of vandalism, at least not in the traditional sense. Looking at the matter as a whole, I suspect the intention Solacis had here was to just get the editing of the CRT done because he assumed the changes would be accepted, and that he could change it later if they weren't, with the thread ultimately being forgotten about afterwards. In case this needs to be stated; that's still a violation. I only note this because the alternate impression, that Solacis was intentionally trying to circumvent the CRT process to manipulate people into thinking his changes were accepted without any need for input, leads to a very different framing of the situation. Had that been true, I don't even think he would have made a CRT for it, nor would he have been actively discussing the matter with the staff on the CRT to explain it and get approval well after making the additions. This makes me think he was trying to get this approved legitimately, and it was just buried.
This is overall a less significant part of the report, so I'll just reinforce the already stated point that such changes do require CRT approval.
I'll note that this is referencing the same string of revisions to the Kiana page that was noted in the first part, albeit a different section.
I genuinely can't tell if all the abilities added are indeed just inherited from other profiles that had the same abilities accepted for having the same powers, and I don't think it's too important one way or the other. Even a line of reasoning as straightforward as "this character had this", "other characters who had this got these abilities", "therefore, this character should get these abilities" is still something that would require a minor content revision. Something as simple as "this character was shown flying", "therefore, we should put flight on their profile" requires a minor content revision - let alone the addition of a new key on the basis of inferred abilities due to other aspects of the verse.
I also don't find it satisfactory to say that this was justified because the profiles were not yet complete. I think that's demonstrably not true, at least not in the way we'd usually say this - the profiles had existed for a while, and had gone nearly 1 month periods without changes multiple times. This wasn't a case of making a brief addition to a page after publishing it because it had slipped their mind. If what Solacis is saying is that the pages had been published while aware that certain aspects weren't included and would have to be added down the line, then - that's just what CRTs are for. If these changes were so important that the page should not have gone without them, then the page simply shouldn't have been published in its prior state. This simply isn't a reason to make changes without a CRT.
As I've mentioned above about this same string of changes, I think Solacis was likely overzealous rather than actively attempting to manipulate the people involved. I don't think Solacis is lying when he says that he thought these changes wouldn't have needed a CRT - I do, however, suspect he was biasing himself away from questioning his behaviour.
This contains numerous important accusations:
1: Solacis recreated the
Honkai Energy page from scratch without a CRT;
2: The verse overhaul thread which was used to delete and recreate the profiles was not accepted;
3: Solacis lied to Just_A_Random_Butler and claimed the thread was accepted to have the profiles deleted.
Solacis above has only responded to the first accusation, and I don't find his response very satisfactory. "Minimal" is an abstraction, but I can't see how you would argue that the changes Solacis made to the
newer version compared to the
old version were minimal - the pages are nearly unrecognisable both in style and substance, and they say very different things about the same concept. This should have been done with a CRT, like any other restructures and additions/removals of this sort.
Solacis has not responded to the other two accusations. I would have preferred if he did to have his side of the story, especially on the second point, but there's not much to say there. I'll simply note what I can see - that this verse overhaul thread indeed didn't receive sufficient staff approval, and that Solacis said he had received 'agreement' towards deleting the verse in the profile deletion thread.
I'll note a few issues with the semantics that make me suspect there is a misunderstanding here. Solacis, in the profile deletions thread, said this:
The interpretation of this statement that has been spoken of so far is "there was substantial staff agreement in this thread about the poor quality of these pages to overhaul this verse". But looking at the contents of
the thread itself, particularly the OP, I don't think this is what Solacis meant. I think what he was saying was "the other verse supporters joined the server I linked on this thread about the poor quality of the pages, and we all agreed to overhaul this verse".
If this is true, it doesn't make things a whole lot better. Firstly, the discussion on the thread itself was limited - the general impression by the supporters does seem to be that they were supporting the idea, but it would appear a lot of it was left for the private Discord discussion between the supporters. Secondly, if the intention was to say "we discussed and agreed to delete the verse
in this private Discord server", then such a claim should not come from word-of-mouth from a single person - if a verse is going to be deleted because of the opinions of the supporters, this should always be dealt with on-site. Thirdly,
some supporters who were active and in the process of making changes to the verse were not involved in this discussion. Fourthly, he still didn't seek staff approval for what was a very substantial change.
However, this does make me think that he was not intentionally lying to Just_A_Random_Butler about this matter. I do believe, considering the state of the Honkai pages before and after the deletion and recreation, that there probably was a lot of discussion around what the pages should be changed to and ultimately consensus on the matter. What I'm left with is much the same as what I interpreted from a lot of the above situations - that Solacis has severely mishandled this situation, but that he wasn't trying to manipulate the people involved.
This has been quite a lot, so I will briefly summarise my conclusions. Solacis has frequently committed vandalism and related rule violations in his revisions to the Honkai pages, as well as violations of the discussion rules in regards to his handling of CRT approvals and the deletion of the verse. In varying cases, I believe he was or was not aware that these were rule violations. However, I generally disagree with the interpretation that this behaviour was done for the purpose of manipulating the staff and other members involved.
If I may offer an anecdote here - well in the past now, roughly 2019-2020 or so, I worked with Solacis on the
Persona verse (which has since been merged into the Megami Tensei verse). We distinctly did not get along back then, and while we have made up over the years and put it behind us, much of what I see here is reminiscent of why I didn't think well of him then. My opinion of Solacis at the time was that he was extremely overzealous about getting changes done, impatient about disagreements and debate over things he had concluded on, and neurotic about having every page set up the specific way that he wanted them to be. I found him to be difficult to deal with, especially as someone who often came to the opposite conclusions as him, as both of us were very stubborn about having the changes done the way we wanted them to be done. But I can't recall ever thinking that he was actively manipulative; if anything, I thought he was a bit too honest about his strong opinions and only invited conflict because of it. When I see things like what has been reported here - applying CRTs without proper approval, pushing for the deletion of a verse without adequate prudence, adding sections to pages without explanation - I ultimately think I'm seeing the same thing I saw before; that he doesn't like the state of the verse, and is pushing too hard to have it changed. What I don't think is that he's actively trying to sweep things under the rug or trick people so he can get his way.
With that tangent out of the way - I ultimately believe these rule violations, particularly the consistent application of changes to pages without proper approval, cannot continue. It has been a lot of damage to the integrity of our pages, and I don't believe a warning is sufficient to reinforce the severity of this issue and prevent it in the future. I think the only way to address an issue like this properly is with a ban of a long duration, with the understanding that proper prudence towards future wiki content should be met upon their return. However, I would not be content with a permanent ban for what I ultimately don't think is an irredeemable issue in the context. I would put forward something in the range of 6 months at a minimum to 1 year at a maximum, and I would personally advocate for 6 months.
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