On Fri, 23 Dec 2011, Charles Matthews wrote: >> 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
IAR doesn't help. IAR is useful only when you don't need it; if everyone is reasonable, you can ignore rules. But if there's a conflict between two sides, and one wants to obey the rules and one wants to ignore them, the side that wants to obey them wins every time. Besides, IAR has a problem for BLPs. It says the rules can be ignored to improve the encyclopedia. Helping a BLP subject doesn't improve the encyclopedia (and yes, I've seen this come into effect). So you can't use IAR-or at least, you face an unnecessary hurdle in using it. > BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be hardest to argue that > rules should be ignored. Yes, but that can be bad as well--it also is hard to ignore rules *for the purpose of helping the BLP subject*. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
