David Gerard wrote:
Someone's trying to cure [[WP:IAR]] with
instruction creep again.
They're already trying to tell people who think the change is
ridiculous not to intrude on the process. Pick today's process!
I think this is probably something cyclical:
1) IAR starts short and simple;
2) IAR gets expanded by people trying to be helpful;
3) IAR gets further expanded by people adding exceptions and
corollories to the previous additions;
4) IAR becomes a hideous monstrosity;
5) someone sane comes along and makes it short and simple again;
6) we have a big bunfight about what the role of IAR is, generally
vastly complicated by people who don't understand what the point
of it is and are resistant to having it explained to them;
7) see (1)
The 'Brainstorming' page appears to be a rather more organised attempt
at step (2), but I can't see that it has any realistic chance of
breaking the cycle.
Some Wikipedians always seem to want to artificially restrict IAR with
examples, procedures and so on, because they are worried that 'IAR will
be abused'. What I think we need to remind these people of frequently is
that it really doesn't matter all that much if IAR *does* get 'abused'
(whatever that is taken to mean), since this is still a Wiki and almost
any change is trivially undoable.
Cheers,
N.
--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3456
University of Durham Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK WWW:
http://nick.frejol.org/