User blog comment:JustSomeDude.../JSD's "Secret" Agenda/@comment-3423357-20150206030654/@comment-4899461-20150206055132

First off, the "strongly preferred" stuff was a mistake, it should have been changed a long time ago, and I'm sorry if that was confusing.

I do think you bring up an interesting point about the wiki's "elitism". In fact something you probably don't know is that the anti-jpg rule was proposed by an editor who eventually left/got banned because he was trying to push an agenda which, in retrospect was elitist to an extreme level. His attitude definitely helped push a lot of editors (even veterans) away, and is definitely one of the main reasons why I've written this blog.

That said though, I'm actually a big fan of most of our image rules. I've dug through a lot of images from before we tightened the rules, and things are much better off now. And images are the #1 source of bad/unnecessary edits here, so I personally think the tightness of our rules is necessary.

What could use a strong look over though is our response to those rules being broken... And I have no idea right now how to look at that, but it's definitely food for thought.