"There is an anti-admin platoon. It isn't large enough to be a brigade. Its members, who are also "excellent content creators", get away with incivility toward both admins and new editors." – Robert McClenon

For all practical purposes, desysopping acts as a permanent bar to an editor ever becoming an admin again. – Iridescent [1]

A personal attack is something that is personal. It has to target "somebody" specific, and it has to target their identity. Jehochman[2]

Please leave my talk page. You are too unpleasant. It's not worth my time to speak with you. comment by an admin to an established user.

'...the New Puritan tendency looking for pretexts to block people for imagined incivility and feigned offence. – Iridescent, March 2020.

Part of the problem is the perennial moronic view that someone who makes a lot of good edits should be allowed to get away with being uncivil and making numerous personal attacks, unlike new editors who should get blocked for far smaller numbers of uncivil comments. I have no idea why that view is so common, but it is, and it makes it virtually impossible to take any effective action against such editors. - JamesBWatson [3]

Any article edited by a promotional editor should always be deleted. This is the only way to discourage people from using the WP for advertising. If the subject is actually important, someone else will create an article. Rescuing it sends the message that if your write an unacceptable article about yourself, someone will very possibly fix it for you, and therefore you might as well try to advertise here. It furthermore sends the message that if you you hire someone to write an article and they take money for doing this, and they write the usual unacceptable article such people write, then someone will fix it for you free, while the guy who wrote the bad article gets the money. – DGG

The Internet has been around for 25 years. Too many Wikipedia users don't know a world without it. The Internet has changed the ways society thinks, studies, and works. The Internet has done a lot of good and a lot of not so good. Wikipedia is a brilliant project. Ironically it depends on the Internet. - Kudpung

Pretty much every significant setback in Wikipedia's history can be traced directly to someone at the WMF who thinks they're being helpful trying to force their preferred change rather than just suggesting a broad direction and allowing the cats to herd themselves. The traditional ineptness of the WMF's senior management isn't a flaw, it's a feature. ‑ Iridescent

Yeah but no, I think I have better things to do with my time then get involved in something as blatantly "verdict first, trial later" as this one. I've semi-joked before that it's possible to predict the outcome of arbcom cases before they even take place just by looking at the personal grudges of the participants and calculating how far they each think they'll be able to push their preferred outcome and still call it a compromise, but I'm not sure I can recall an example this blatant before. Why not just save everyone the time and jump straight to "Kudpung admonished" now? ‑ Iridescent 15 January 2020

And this is a classic example how, as outlined by Iridescent, our volunteer work is used, abused, and appropriated by the WMF to their own ends. It took a further 7 years to resolve the issue.

(RfA): Of course it's a poor predictor, just as it was in the case of Pastor Theo, Wifione, and some other prominent ones whose names I can't mention because they are still with us and for some reason are still allowed to participate at all. Those who loudly insist that all admins are bad are doing more harm than good and most of their complaints are just righteous indignation and they don't have long block logs for no reason; that's why although there needs to be a fast track system for making admins more accountable, it doesn't always need to end in a removal of the tools and I'm very much averse to the notion that an easier desysoping process should be used as a witch hunt to whittle out more admins under the flimsiest of accusations. I thought that kind of thing went out with McCarthy. – Kudpung, April 30, 2018

AN/I, a dreadful gauntlet where reporting editors are likely to be set upon and censured, or alternatively the complaint languishes unnoticed until it's archived, with or without first generating long discussions between the editors involved in the dispute and/or more or less hasty and sarcastic commentary from gadflies and more or less clueful admin wannabees. There's a regrettable amount of failure to read the complaint carefully, or the diffs. [4] – Yngvadottir

This current ArbCom seems determined to rid us of our best admins. So far they are succeeding admirably, and very few people seem to care or to realize what a ridiculous and insidious form of authoritarianism this is, that a mere handful of people can peremptorily drive the best, hardest working, and most trusted admins off the project with complete impunity. And apparently there's nothing we can do about it, and too few people that care or realize the danger to put a stop to it. [5] – Softlavender

ArbCom is charged with disciplining and judging all of us, and has the power to destroy people's on-wiki reputations, but those reputations are the product of years of work here, and those with higher permissions have them because they are trusted and have the responsibility of exercising judgement in difficult situations. ArbCom telling a trusted editor they are unworthy of that level of trust is not a small thing, [6]– Yngvadottir

...this ArbCom has proven itself to be the most unfair and overactive that we have seen in recent memory. [7] – TonyBallioni

...this is crazy, only a couple months into a new arbcom and 4 great admins are gone. [8] – Puddleglum2.0

For a quick explanation, I'll just say that the enwiki community is like the world's largest dysfunctional family, and I no longer wish to hold a position of responsibility here. —DoRD On handing their admin tools and retiring

We have Arbs and admins who play to the audience, including on IRC and Wikipedia Review, because they want to be liked, or are scared of being disliked. We're hundreds of years behind the rest of the world's institutions when it comes to understanding what fairness entails. [9] – SlimVirgin

I've never warmed up to the reconfirmation idea. [...] RfRC would be a judgment in relation to the current wikipolitical winds by an unstable group of mostly reasonable people unpredictably mixed in with varying numbers of petty grudge-bearers, RfA obsessives, and ANI shitposters. 85% of the time it would go fine, because most admins do mostly boring things and one or two bad calls or unfortunate troll encounters wouldn't cause much fuss. But it'd probably cause more harm in the form of hurt feelings, frustration, and disengagement on the part of perfectly good admins than benefit in the form of removing bad admins. Everybody who thinks that the problem with RfA, or with the existing admin corps, is insufficient desysopping of bad admins knows where the case requests page is. If terrible adminning is really so widespread, we should be drowning in cases. – Opabinia regalis(2019)

Adminship has become a big deal and everyone knows it even if they offer aphorisms to the contrary. SMcCandlish[10]