[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[Ken Arromdee]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, FT2 wrote:
> The problem is there comes a point where you can't improve them in terms of
> definitiveness without them being so long as to defeat easy readability
> ("tl;dr"). At that point we rely on the reader to figure it out. if you can
> spot improvements that others haven't, and they reflect the spirit better
> than the present wording, then Be Bold and see if others agree they are an
> improvement, and fix them!

Well, the last time I ran into this was the way IAR is worded.  For such a
short rule it has a huge flaw: it says you can only ignore rules for the
purpose of improving or maintaining the encyclopedia.  The result is people
constantly claiming that you can't ignore rules for BLP or privacy concerns,
since helping the BLP subject is not a form of improving the encyclopedia.
Obviously it would be overkill to edit IAR itself, but nobody was even
interested on the talk page of WIARM, except one person who said that it's
okay that's badly worded because our rules don't literally mean what they say.