[WikiEN-l] Can sweet reason still work on en:wp? Occasionally.

[Ryan Delaney]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/10/20 Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com>:
> > This is an important point. A proper application of IAR should go
> unnoticed
> > -- at least, by everyone except the "rules are rules" folks who memorize
> the
> > laws and are ready to deliver citations for all your transgressions
> whenever
> > you step a quarter inch out of line. If what you did was a good idea and
> > everyone agrees it was a good idea, nobody should even notice that it was
> > against the rules or that IAR was necessary. Explicitly announcing that
> you
> > are invoking IAR rarely accomplishes more than triggering "rules are
> rules"
> > responses and starting up another round of the perennial IAR
> interpretation
> > debates. (See what has happened in this very thread?)
>
> In an ideal world, that is how things would work. We don't live in an
> ideal world. What actually happens is people complain that you having
> followed the rules and never get as far as reading your explanation.
>
>
You're right-- we don't live in an ideal world, and people often do insist
on inappropriately citing policy as a response to a reasoned argument. You
might notice that usually the people who do this do it on the basis of
arguments rather like the ones you are making in this thread.

-- causa sui