On Tue, 26 May 2009, Fred Bauder wrote:
You're preaching to the choir. Often when we want to do the right thing, we are confronted with a demand for a rule, or presented with one, typically "no censorship". There is no substitute for doing what is appropriate in the circumstances. Trying to codify that principle is futile, although Ignore all rules comes close.
IAR is particularly subject to wikilawyering in this situation. It says that it applies when a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia. This can be easily interpreted to mean that any use of IAR must improve Wikipedia itself, and that considerations outside Wikipedia (such as BLP and other issues related to avoiding harm) are ineligible for IAR.
Trying to do Biographies of living persons without a rule proved futile; so a written policy was created. We still don't have a corresponding policy for organizations. The underlying principle is don't hang an article on scraps of negative information, but you could write a book on the biographies on Wikipedia, and an even more interesting book if you collected all the half-cocked material we have excluded for one reason or another. Not a book you would want to publish or distribute in the UK, however.
Fred Bauder