On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Selective enforcement has an amazing power to
dull the sharp corners
of any rule. Had someone not been interested in trying to make an
example out of this it could have happily sat forever with its less
than totally accurate license tag. Less than ideal, perhaps, but it
would be far far from the worst inaccuracy in tagging.
"Selective enforcement has an amazing power to dull the sharp corners of
any rule" is a bug, not a feature.
Rules which are badly broken enough that we need to selectively enforce
them really should be fixed. And it's easy for selective enforcement to
turn into WP:ILIKEIT, where things that people like are immune to the
rules, while things that people don't like can get rule-lawyered out of
existence. Once everyone is a lawbreaker, anyone can be arrested at the
whim of the police.
The police, judges and lawmakers are not independent groups in the
wikipedia community, inevitably leading to corruption at some stage.
Peter