On Fri, 23 Dec 2011, Charles Matthews wrote:
And the more
you use "it's in the
rules" as a club to hit bad users with, the more others can use it as a
club
to force bad ideas through; there's just no defense to "what I want
follows the
rules". You see this all the time for BLPs: "Don't you have any empathy?
We're hurting a real person." "You're just trying to distract us from
this
rule. Your own personal feelings aren't an excuse to ignore our
policies..."
We have IAR
IAR doesn't help. IAR is useful only when you don't need it; if everyone is
reasonable, you can ignore rules. But if there's a conflict between two
sides, and one wants to obey the rules and one wants to ignore them, the
side that wants to obey them wins every time.
Besides, IAR has a problem for BLPs. It says the rules can be ignored
to improve the encyclopedia. Helping a BLP subject doesn't improve the
encyclopedia (and yes, I've seen this come into effect). So you can't use
IAR-or at least, you face an unnecessary hurdle in using it.
BLPs are of course an obvious place where it may be
hardest to argue that
rules should be ignored.
Yes, but that can be bad as well--it also is hard to ignore rules *for the
purpose of helping the BLP subject*.