On 12/23/11 7:27 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 22 December 2011 18:10, Ken
Arromdee<arromdee(a)rahul.net> 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".
Given the jungle of Wiki rules there is likely a rule somewhere that
says the opposite. Tracking it down is the stuff of lawyers, or at least
can waste a lot of time. Rules work well when it's truly a question of
bad users. For others they generate chaos.
> 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..."
Just like Assange was hurting real people with Wikileaks.
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.
A convergent or divergent series?
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.
Follow the Tao of Wiki.
BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be
hardest to argue that
rules should be ignored.
BLPs need to be treated as the exception to the general
rule.
Ec