User:El Sandifer/Rules are responsible for their application

Policies, guidelines, and essays have two parts. The first part is the basic principle. The second part is the application of this principle to the larger project. This second part is often tricky - it involves process, and process can get ugly fast. Plenty of great ideas (deleting terrible articles) have dreadful processes (AfD). Policy pages are responsible for both parts of this. If a policy, guideline, or essay is routinely being used destructively, thoughtlessly, or badly, the policy is at fault, and needs to be reworked to prevent bad applications.

It is not enough to say "of course there are a few exceptions" or "if the policy is being misapplied, its the user's fault." Policies are social engineering. If the policy is not working in practice or is being used for bad purposes, it needs to be thoroughly debugged. The policy needs to be reworked until it prevents its own bad application. (Of course, WP:IAR should probably go ahead and ignore this too.)

The most common case of this is robotic application. When a policy starts getting applied quickly to a large number of articles without much thought, it almost always goes wrong. This is how spoiler tags get added to articles on Shakespeare plays, WikiProject boxes get added to articles that are only of passing interest to the WikiProject, and tags get added to basic, obvious statements. Unfortunately, if a policy can be applied by a robot, it probably will be, whether literally or figuratively. The best way to combat this is to necessitate thought, judgment, and care in the policy page. Do not attempt to create white-line distinctions between "good" and "bad." Lay out some principles and goals for the policy page, and require that the editors applying the policy page actually think before doing it.

attempted rewrite by David
Nutshell: If a policy or guideline is routinely being used destructively, thoughtlessly or badly, the policy itself likely needs to be reworked or removed.

Any policy, process or guideline has two parts: the basic principle and the application of the principle to the encyclopedia.

The second part involves process, and this can often obscure the principle. e.g. deletion of bad articles is good; WP:AFD has dreadful processes. e.g. being helpful to other editors is good; Esperanza was so destructive it needed utter removal.

A process that consistently produces bad results needs reworking or removal.

Saying "it's the user's fault" is not enough &mdash; policies are social engineering. A bad application of a good idea is a bad application and needs debugging or throwing out.

Common examples:
 * Robotic application. When a process gets applied quickly to large numbers of articles without thought, it almost always goes wrong, and you get templates on Shakespeare.
 * If a policy can be applied by a robot, it probably will be. Or a human version of one.
 * ... (more needed)

Note that WP:IAR should probably ignore this one too.