It was an absolutely pathetic incident, engineered from the very outset by rogue Admins to ensure the Wikipedia community be denied the chance to vote for someone who had promised this in their candidate statement.......
As an arbitrator now, I would emphasize re-establishing civility as a central policy.
I am one hundred percent certain Maxim did this whole thing, just to prevent the restoration of civility as a core principle. As he would go on to say as justification for him opening a crat chat for that super controversial RfA for RexxS (who had shown his own Admin credentials by calling someone a prat right before he was nominated).....
As a community, we have rehashed the dumpster fire that is civility/vested contributors so many times over many years—perhaps even over a decade—with no good resolution.
Maxim saw another dumpster fire on the horizon in this candidacy, perhaps even had a long history of feuding with Bauder over this very issue, and he knew had the power to stop it, so he did so.
It seems rather obvious therefore, that the opportunity was probably provided to him deliberately too. The initial bun fight that ultimately allowed Maxim to step in was of course triggered by a particularly cuntish bit of behaviour by Eric Corbett, and it would seem likely that he was put up to it by his handler Iridescent, who would of course then join in the fun, which was very odd of course because it's actually quite rare for Iridescent to actually do any controversial admin work.
As usual on Wikipedia, the more obvious the unspoken agendas, the less they get talked about in the final analysis.
Fred Bauder, in a word, got shafted.
He was right in all the important respects of the case....
1. There was no emergency. Absolutely no case existed for anyone to be throwing around IAR as a justification for edit warring, wheel warring or out of process desysopping.
2. Eric Corbett was being a cunt. A really nasty cunt. Who probably violated OUTING and BLP, as well as just being a proper nasty cunt, and over something so petty as an election to ArbCom.
3. The election commission were asleep at the wheel, and effectively left Fred Bauder no choice but to act as his own protector in the face of severe provocations.
But being right is not enough in Wikipedia. The rules lawyers got their pathetic victory, as they knew they would.
It always amazed me that these people, pricks like Beeblebrox and Boing! and the rest, act like outsiders can't see what they're doing. Can't see right through their excuses. It will bite them in the ass in the end.
It is enough to see what a rude bastard Beeblebrox has been about Fred ever since, properly gloating and flaunting the fact he got away with it, to demonstrate that for him, and for a few others too, their stated defences/explanations for what they did here, were fucking bullshit.
This was just a very nasty affair all round, an absolute ambush. Probably personal. Probably the settling of major scores. Definitely done to suppress once and for all, any chance of civility actually becoming a thing again.
In other words, it was Wikipedia. They evolve, adapt, finding ever new creative ways to hide their true selves from the gullible donors and Congress.
Neve again will anyone stand for ArbCom on a pro-civlity platform. Even though, and this is the FUCKING HILARIOUS part, we can all now see the hopelessness of the community trying to accommodate a cunt like Eric Corbett, and the recklessness of Maxim choosing to set aside widespread civility concerns about RexxS.
Still, it's not like these incidents will change anyone's mind. Anyone standing on a pro-civlity platform now, will be assessed for weaknesses. It will be wargamed, they will try and think of something, anything they can do, to sabotage their candidacy.
Eric Corbett is long gone, but there's no lack of other useful idiots.
The right to be assholes really does matter that much to these people.