[WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia and the poison of procedural literalism

[Gregory Maxwell]

In a recent discussion on the Wiki someone made a proposal which began
"In the case of biographies of living people, where a number of
editors have expressed the opinion either (...)".
One of the outspoken critics of the general class of proposal began
his retort "First, what is 'a number'? As a mathematician I'll tell
you that 0 is a number."

Now, I didn't particularly support this proposal either, ... but I'm
not about to argue that zero users fits the proposed criteria.  In the
same general set of proposals there were a couple of people earnestly
arguging that some change to AfD closure procedure could be expected
to result in the deletion of [[George W. Bush]]  and [[Bill Clinton]].
 ... I don't think the particulars of the proposal are relevant for
the meta-issue I'm raising here, if you want to argue about BLP and
AfD there is a dandy discussion going on on the wiki...

But how can the project ever hope to continuing surviving when people
slash at honest proposals with outrageously literalistic arguments
like this?