[WikiEN-l] Notability and Fiction

[Ken Arromdee]

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Surreptitiousness wrote:
> Currently there is too much bickering and too 
> many people interested more in "fighting the good fight" than accepting 
> [[WP:IAR]].

There's a reason for this: In a dispute, the side who can point to a rule gets
to win.  If there are two sides of a dispute, one pointing to a rule, the
other saying to use IAR, the IAR loses.  It's how we've set up the system.
We arranged it so that rules are extremely important and must be obeyed at
all costs--otherwise we couldn't use the rules as a bludgeon against
troublemakers.  Now that we have placed such importance on rules, it turns
out that rules can also be used as a bludgeon by rule-wonks.