G'day Steve,
On 8/16/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I believe I tried rewriting WP:LIVING in that manner, but it seems to have become long-winded and didactic - and hence bloody useless - since then. Could people please hack at it with a guide to *ease of use*? Thanks ever so much.
Maybe our policy pages need to be divided into "policy" and "discussion". The policy bit, which should never be more than a page, should say "do this, and don't do that". The discussion can have the reasoning why, the special cases, and all that other crap that always gets in there.
The reasoning is the most important *part* of any policy. This is because rules only exist to make you think before you break them; when you know the reasoning behind a particular rule, it's so much easier to think along the right lines, so you don't needlessly break an appropriate rule or needlessly uphold an inappropriate one.
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".
For the potentially Clueful searching our policy pages, this sort of thing only acts to obscure the truth about how Wikipedia works. For the eager newbie trying to learn how to behave according to what he's heard about Wikipedia's arcane lore, this cruft is confusing and harmful to his education. For the seasoned newbie who thinks he's not a newbie anymore, the cruft provides a valuable weapon for the beating up of more Clueful individuals while screaming ancient and evil spells corrupted, as many things are, by the Chinese Whispers Effect.
The cruft that builds up on policy pages is a terrible thing, and I can fully understand why David wants to take a machete to it. However, I'm not sure that restriction policy pages to: "the rule" and "a short piece where the long-winded discussion used to go" would be helpful. I dare say if we did that, the reasoning would vanish completely[1] and be replaced by the useless cruft.
[0] Fair dinks! There was a longish discussion about the rules which applied when one wanted to invoke IAR.
[1] Rather than being, like the reasoning behind Gratiano's wayward tongue, "as two grains of wheat hidden in two bushels of chaff".