Wily D wrote:
The problem, Greg, is that policies on English
Wikipedia are almost
uniformly horribly vague, and so if you have to figure out what they
mean by ''reading'' them, you're likely to come to errant
conclusions
- but the reality is that most editors do figure out what they mean by
reading them, and misunderstandings about. Realistically new BLP
handling situations probably won't result in [[Bill Clinton]] being
deleted - but as long as they're written to allow this, the policy is
wrong, not the person suggesting perhaps the policy should say what it
means.
Policies are often enforced with the same kind of literalist mindset
... so it makes sense to evaluate proposals that way.
I'm a bit late on this post, but really policies are only quoted
literally to support arguments, not actually enforced literally. What's
actually enforced is consensus, which the written policy pages often lag
behind or don't capture at all. Now once an existing consensus (or
compromise, or something similar) is written into policy, it does tend
to be somewhat effective to quote it to influence future consensus ("but
[[WP:SOMETHING]] says...!"), but it's not a legal code or anything.
Even more fun fact: policy varies widely by subject area. If your
favorite supposed policy is very unpopular among the majority of editors
in an area, it for most purposes isn't policy in that area.
-Mark