Rules on WP, was Re: Talk pages Considered Harmful (for references) - WikiEN-l

23 Dec 2011

On 22 December 2011 18:10, Ken Arromdee &lt;arromdee(a)rahul.net&gt; wrote:

...

 And for the general problem is something I've often noted: Wikipedia is set
 up to force people to follow the rules. 

Interesting debating point, but I think the comment is ahistorical. It is
more accurate, IMO, to note that "slavish" rule-following on enWP is a
characteristic of non-"old school" editors. It may well be that the
community as a whole has shifted its centre of gravity on this issue. (The
point covers both the curatorial and disciplinary functions on the site, so
I'd make the case for parsing it further.)

...
  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".  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..."

 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.

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.

BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be hardest to argue that
rules should be ignored.

Charles