[WikiEN-l] Image of the day

[Peter Ansell]

On 30/01/2008, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > Selective enforcement has an amazing power to dull the sharp corners
> > of any rule.  Had someone not been interested in trying to make an
> > example out of this it could have happily sat forever with its less
> > than totally accurate license tag.  Less than ideal, perhaps, but it
> > would be far far from the worst inaccuracy in tagging.
>
> "Selective enforcement has an amazing power to dull the sharp corners of
> any rule" is a bug, not a feature.
>
> Rules which are badly broken enough that we need to selectively enforce
> them really should be fixed.  And it's easy for selective enforcement to
> turn into WP:ILIKEIT, where things that people like are immune to the
> rules, while things that people don't like can get rule-lawyered out of
> existence.  Once everyone is a lawbreaker, anyone can be arrested at the
> whim of the police.

The police, judges and lawmakers are not independent groups in the
wikipedia community, inevitably leading to corruption at some stage.

Peter