On 22 December 2011 18:10, Ken Arromdee <arrom...@rahul.net> wrote: > > And for the general problem is something I've often noted: Wikipedia is set > up to force people to follow the rules.
Interesting debating point, but I think the comment is ahistorical. It is more accurate, IMO, to note that "slavish" rule-following on enWP is a characteristic of non-"old school" editors. It may well be that the community as a whole has shifted its centre of gravity on this issue. (The point covers both the curatorial and disciplinary functions on the site, so I'd make the case for parsing it further.) > And the more you use "it's in the > rules" as a club to hit bad users with, the more others can use it as a > club > to force bad ideas through; there's just no defense to "what I want > follows the > rules". You see this all the time for BLPs: "Don't you have any empathy? > We're hurting a real person." "You're just trying to distract us from this > rule. Your own personal feelings aren't an excuse to ignore our > policies..." > > We have IAR, and "slavishness" might be called IIAR, so it should be ignored as a guideline (IIIAR should trump IIAR). This could all get silly but according to some logical stuff, that has been known since about 1920, I^4AR is probably no different from I^2AR. In other words, if the writ of "ignore all rules" no longer runs because the community thinks of it as too retro, there can still be some meta-principle about not following the wrong path just because rules indicate it. "Rule-bound" is like "muscle-bound", a pejorative, and rightly so. BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be hardest to argue that rules should be ignored. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
