On Sep 17, 2006, at 2:14 AM, David Mestel wrote:
On 17/09/06, Phil Sandifer
<Snowspinner(a)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.
There's an interesting parallel to IAR in the New Testament.
Jesus complains that they are just parroting prayers without
really thinking about what they mean, and says they should
make up a relevant prayer each time. They ask him for an
example of what such a prayer would be like.
He gives them the Lord's prayer.