User blog comment:JustSomeDude.../JSD's "Secret" Agenda/@comment-3423357-20150206030654/@comment-4830337-20150206222450

We definitely have too many rules, but I'm going ahead and blame it on certain editors that got in far too many edit wars with others, which forced us to make rules in order to prevent these edit wars from occurring again.

I'm bringing up Meganoide and his edit wars over using redirect links or direct links. He edited many chapter and episode articles, changing the redirect links to direct links, and several people undid him. This led to multiple edit wars, with a lot of insults flying around, which ultimately resulted in his block, not just one times, but TWO times. To avoid similar situations in the future, we had a forum about using redirects or not, decided that we would use direct links, and made it in a rule. Many other rules also came to be in this way.

Another rule states that you cannot remove messages from your talk page, unless it is to archive your talk page. I don't know why or how did it came to be, but it was originally unwritten and even unenforced at times. However, an editor who did not get along with the rest of the community wanted to remove messages from her talk page, and another editor enforced the unwritten rule, which obviously led to an edit war. We had a forum on it, but both sides were very angry at each other, and it basically turned in insulting and mocking each other. So as a result of the horrible behavior from both sides, we added the rule and many other rules to the policies page, as a precaution for the future.

There are a lot of these examples all over the wiki. We never had the need to put down all of these rules before, probably because most editors understood each other, knew what were acceptable and what were not acceptable, and most of the time, new editors easily caught on that and went along with the attitude. Then certain editors came along, such as Galaxy9000, they took advantage of our lack of written rules, and we ended up with so many edit wars that it created a big problem.

What I'm saying is that the rules are excessive, because our lack of rules or written rules caused so many edit wars to occur, that the need for rules arose. It's a piss poor solution, and we should have dealt with the problem itself: the users, instead of making too many rules.

Truthfully, I feel like we're digging ourselves a grave, with all of these rules, and nothing about the users.