On Sep 17, 2006, at 2:14 AM, David Mestel wrote:
On 17/09/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
In essence, we have written a set of policies that fail to reflect how we do work, should work, or could possibly work. And, due to the frighteningly large number of contributors who, given a piece of bad policy, will follow it rigidly without thinking about it, this is a solidly dangerous thing. (Something to remember: IAR is our most ignored rule.)
I have to disagree with you on the IAR point - I just clicked on the "random article" button five times, and not one of the resulting articles had a single source. I think that our problem may be that, because we place such a great demand on our sources, people don't bother to source articles at all. Perhaps we need to demand less in order to achieve more...
It should be noted what IAR means, though. The heart of IAR is that the rules are not and cannot be a substitute for actually thinking. Carelessly leaving out sources is not following IAR. Citing J. Michael Straczynski's web posts in a Babylon 5 article because you know they're reliable no matter what [[WP:RS]] says is following IAR.
Put another way, following policy for policy's sake violates IAR.
-Phil