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

[stevertigo]

On 10/20/09, 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.
>
> 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.

What I gather just from a glance is that its not so much an IAR
argument as it is a VIE (voting is evil) argument, and he evokes IAR
just as a procedural justification.

He's right - not that voting itself is evil, but in our context we
need and want to make intelligent editorial decisions. That means
making qualitative discernements about the voting arguments - not just
quantifying votes into a running count.
Formally, we don't currently discern according to editor "quality" -
we just don't have the means to do so. But we also don't formally make
efforts to discern the quality of arguments, and that's why - in spite
of it being "evil" - the formal method is still just basic
quantification.

So the question is, how do we aggregate and sort arguments such that
we can apply a meta process for quickly discerning good, valid,
arguments, from those that aren't? Other than "IAR" that is?

-Steven