On 8/17/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
The cruft (and I *do* mean cruft) that fills many policy pages, including for a time [[WP:IAR]][0], is not the sort of reasoning I mean. It's not "this is why we made this rule". It is instead, "here's some musings on how I'd interpret the exact wording of the rule, combined with the musings of a dozen other people, all of whom wouldn't give a rats about the real reasoning here but have conflicting views about what the best loopholes are".
Yeah you're probably right about all this. Most of the "cruft" is probably written by the half-clueful. Those who are grasping to understand what the policy is really about, and have to put it in more concrete terms, which may not really be true in all instances.
Though I don't really know how to bridge the gap from a purely abstract ideal like "verifiability" to a useful set of guidelines, without coming up with bullshit rules like "don't quote from blogs".
Steve