" 

 == The arbitration motion == 

 Malleus, I don't want to see you banned, nor do I want you to retire, although of course the latter is your choice.  

 But there are a lot of editors, obviously including several arbitrators, who are concerned at how you sometimes address fellow editors on-wiki. It's not any one comment or set of comments; it's a persistent thing, and even if this wasn't your intent, it has become repeatedly disruptive. You weren't just chosen at random to be the subject of the motion. 

 Anyone can lose his or her temper, in the heat of a content dispute or a noticeboard dispute or an RfA or whatever, and say something that shouldn't have been said. Anyone can even deliberately decide, once in a blue moon, that it is best to use unusually charged, pungent language. But the whole point of such language is to evince unusually great anger or hostility or frustration. What's the point of doing it every day? 

 The problem is not that you have called one or two people (I'm deliberately exaggerating this for effect) ""sanctimonious dishonest hypocritical fucking cunty-twats."" It's that it feels as if you regularly call people ""sanctimonious dishonest hypocritical fucking cunty-twats"", and that you think it's a good thing to call some people ""sanctimonious dishonest hypocritical fucking cunty-twats"", and that if you get into a controversy tomorrow you're as likely as not to call someone else a sanctimonious dishonest hypocritical fucking cunty-twat. 

 Of course the frustrating thing is that you'll do that right in the midst of helping a newcomer who's trying to figure out an editing problem, reviewing a few GA nominations, and putting in a couple of hours polishing your next FA. 

 I have worked with my fellow arbitrators for a long time, and I am confident they don't really want to ban you. (No one should ever want to ban anyone from contributing to ""the encyclopedia that anyone can edit""; bans are a last-resort, though it's always a judgment call when it's necessary to employ that last resort, lest retaining one editor cost us five others.) I think what the arbitrators voting for the motion want, as the proposer has already said, is for you to say you'll make some effort to change your behavior. Not to become Caspar Milquetoast, and not to parrot some imaginary party line (as if we all agreed with each other about everything anyway), and not to change your views about who should or shouldn't become an administrator (although you're still wrong about ""immigrated to"" and Jeremy Lin).  

 Just to tone it down a notch already. Or n notches, for some positive value of n. If you agree to do this, maybe I can open a thread in the Civility RfC to quantify n. (I vote for pi-squared-over-six, which is a very cool number. But I digress.) 

 The civility policy is actually very simple: Editors are expected to be reasonably courteous to each other. There's a good reason this is a policy, though it's obviously not the only policy there is. Do you think it should be a policy? Do you think you've made even a minimal effort to adhere to it? Are you willing to try? 

 But I can readily imagine a Wikipedia in which Malleus Faturoum accomplishes everything he wants to, while softening the sharp edges and incendiary rhetoric that have brought things to where they are now. Can you?   "