Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26285319-20170104192003/@comment-24894325-20170311225416

To be completely honest, whatever changes I proposed, I did not consider them as applying retroactively.

There have been debates on validity. Decisions have been made. To have all that uprooted based on a clarification of the rule (because I don't think we are changing its intent) would be barbaric, undemocratic, disrespectful, . It's like revoking French citizenship from somebody born in Saarbrücken, because after the referendum the area transfered from France to Germany. (I'm glad I found a non-inflammatory and non-current example.)

If somebody feels very strongly against some story, I guess a change in the rule (aka "new information") would give a formal excuse to reopen a validity debate. And let me just say that I am not planning on doing that myself. I presume, for any valid story, there are editors who put a lot of effort into conjoining it to DWU. To tear it all apart, there must be a good reason.

But surely even if some invalidations happen, they should be done on a case-by-case basis, never wholesale.

For me, the purpose of the rule is to clarify the intent that has always been there, to make future debates easier to bring to a close and to prevent some debates that don't need to happen.