Ryan Delaney wrote:
You know, policy and process used to be relaxed because Wikipedia was a wholly new thing and no one had any idea how to make it work yet. We could only figure out what works through experience. But as time passed, and as experience repeated itself, we learned from it and the patterns inherent in it. There was quite a lot of naive innocence in the old days, but it couldn't last forever. What was once an amorphous mass is slowly taking shape and solidifying. As time passes it will inevitably solidify further. Corrections and adaptations will be made in an endless process, as it is with all evolving things, whether they are animals or city-states.
The fact is that people learn best by doing and making mistakes. A kid learning about computers doesn't start by reading a stack of manuals. He pokes at different keys to see what happens. Often nothing happens; occasionally the computer crashes, but he learns from that experience If the computer crashes the "punishment" comes directly from the act itself.
When impose a lot of rules we deny them that experience which was so important to our development. The process increasingly takes on the appearance of something inflexible that resembles the parents and teachers against whom they most rebelled.
But the bottom line is that we've learned that some things just don't work, and so we have rules against them to help other people not make the same mistakes we did when we figured out that those things don't work. When I first came to Wikipedia I was an acrimonious editor who wrote a lot of hero worship about people he likee. Since then I've learned a better way, and we have rules about personal attacks, civility, and against original research so that other people won't make the same mistakes I did. These rules may not be broken because we know that they create a negative editing evironment. There are many other examples like this where rules and process have developed over time and experience, not drawn up arbitrarily out of thin air as some people seem to think they have been.
We learned that some things don't work; the newcomers didn't. Depriving them of the opportunities to make mistakes is not "helping" them.
I treat ideas like civility and NPOV as prionciples rather than rules.
Ec