Where for art thou, Giano?

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I wonder what happened to Giano?

Or to be accurate, the user known as.....

* Giano (2004 - 2006)
* Giano II (2006 - 2009)
* GiacomoReturned (2009 - 2012)
* Giano (2012 - 2022)

These were essentially his main accounts, the assorted switching being explained by Giano being a technical illiterate.

He also had at least one joke account....

* The Lady Catherine de Burgh (2012 - 2021, 1 edit in 2023)

It seems only fitting that when he actually finally retired in 2022, blanking his Giano user and user talk pages out of the blue on 31 August, nobody even seemed to notice, or more likely, just didn't care. By this time, any sense anyone had that Giano did anything out of principle or a sincere belief in Wikipedia, had gone. People finally realised what has been obvious very early on, namely that he was a born attention seeker, his talk page contributions often functionally indistinguishable from trolling.

Despite the fact Giano was making what substantial content edits right into 2022, the whole let Giano do whatever he likes because he writes awesome content movement seemed to have died its inevitable death long ago. Latterly Giano surely also keenly felt the loss of Eric Corbett, and perhaps felt uneasy about the fact that unlike Eric, Giano had actually successfully attained Untouchable status on Wikipedia. True, literal immunity.

Only by then, he didn't really have anything to rail against, and he began a feedback loop where the more he stayed away the less he knew about any current controversy. Not that Giano ever let his own ignorance stop him commenting in his trademark inflammatory way, but you do need to at least know who the bad guys are.

All Giano had to occupy himself latterly, was editing. And since that doesn't seem to have been enough to keep Giano interested in Wikipedia, I guess we finally saw the truth of Giano, just as we saw the final truth of Eric Corbett when he committed the cardinal sin of block evasion using a sock. Both got far more from Wikipedia, even at the height of supposedly being greatly distressed by it, than they ever put back in.

Every single time Giano or Eric claimed to only aspire to a simple quiet life being an editor, it was clearly a lie. Eric always had a very easy route to a quiet life - bite your tongue. He literally couldn't do it. By virtue of his pantomime existence having gone on so long everyone basically started ignoring him, Giano seems to have found the quiet life to be actually quite terrifying. The horror of being irrelevant.

It was actually quite sad, in the end, to see just how ridiculous Giano tried to be in the grand matters of wiki-state, just to get someone to notice him. The downside of being truly untouchable, but also not being an Administrator, meant that people took the advice of Team Giano to heart. I wonder if they ever realised they were sowing the seeds of Giano's departure by advising people to take no notice of Giano.

Although he still had his relatively meagre stable of content produced by him and his friends to keep him in a source of fury as changing editorial standards left legacy editors like him behind, it doesn't seem to have been a fight he thought he could win, but nor does it seem to have been a fight he thought could lose, but lose in a sufficiently loud and attention grabbing way.

Notbaly, in these meagre efforts, Giano was not so subtly calling his fellow editors Nazis ("book burners") and anti-semites in his last few months. He even said the Nazi stuff to directly to Administrator Bishonen, and the anti-Semitism stuff was uttered in direct view of multiple high ranking editors and Administrators.

Nobody cared. Ultimate power.

It makes his parallel crimes of calling the anti-Semite a vandal for making legitimate edits, seem almost mundane. There is of course as we speak, an entire Arbitration Case being held to destroy a so called Legacy Administrator for not keeping up with the times and sticking to the technical definition of WP:VANDALISM.

Giano never had to worry about such things, thanks in large part to the protection Bishonen. She of course has the only ultimate power on Wikipedia worth having. An Administrator doing nothing about a user coming to their talk page looking for help dealing with the Nazis messing up their content? Normal, when the Administrator is Bishonen. Higher standard? Lmfao.

Never in a million years are you going to see that sort of thing being given the airing it deserves in an Arbitration Case. Jimmy Wales would be disgusted by it, but Bishonen saw him off. It's her Wikipedia now.

Sadly, or hilariously, it seems to me that it was precisely because in his later years, as changing editorial standards have caught up with these legacy editors, Giano couldn't rely on the same things he used to rely on to get his way. Despite dropping these hugely inflammatory bombs, he couldn't turn relatively ordinary Wikipedia processes like AfD and FAR into complete firestorms. These processes now conclude as they would, regardless of Giano's contributions. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses, but he is always irrelevant.

Seemingly to make sure his legion of fans knew this final diva quit was meant to be a full and permanent retirement, forty minutes after his blanking, he made one last final cryptic edit, with the edit summary "Addio", which is Italian for goodbye. But since he has pulled this same stunt so many times, still nobody cared.

It's quite incredible to see that since this disappearance, there hasn't been a single message of concern on his talk page. Literally nobody cares. Gerda placed her weird reminder of her unofficial precious awards, but she does that for everyone she likes, so it was not exactly about lamenting Giano. It is up for debate whether she even noticed that by then, Giano was long gone.

Bishonen has dropped a template in February letting him know she has sent him an email. There has been no reply on wiki, which is unusual for Giano. Like all her protectees, Giano most of all knows that when your protector comes a calling, you pay fealty.

That one edit by the joke account in June 2023 was rather amusingly, Giano returning after almost ten months away, to restore his original user page, with the edit summary "Long enough!" . Quite what it means is up for debate. If it is the end of a protest, where is Giano?