On Nov 6, 2007 12:02 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
It's a lot easier for people to clean up rubbish if they can avoid waisting their lives with never ending arguments by relying on simple bright line bureaucratic rules. "Oh you used blue ink. The form clearly says black ink. I'm going to rip this up and you're going to have to start over".
It's actually worse than you think. That particular enforcement rule is because the description page doesn't link to an existing article. One interpretation of WP:NFCC 10c is that the description should link to every article that is it being used on. If this is not the case it will be tagged as an invalid rationale, *even* if there is a plain text human entered rationale there. Why this isn't made more apparent in the edit summary is a mystery, and may very well be due to Andrew's theory. You can use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Non-free_use_rationale to put in a rationale, which requires an article name as a parameter...
I'm not justifying this interpretation, and explaining it does make me feel like a Brazil-style bureaucrat, but there you go. :)
This whole scheme is being worked on, and may, hopefully eventually be simplified. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content_criteria/Proposal