On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, Slim Virgin wrote:
Hi Steve, the merge process started about four months ago. It was a simple merge with no changes, and the list was informed. The aim was to get the two policies on one page, tighten the writing a little, and get rid of the word "verifiability." This was causing confusion for new editors because they thought it meant they had to check that material was true, which is what "verify" usually means, rather than simply checking that it had been published elsewhere.
This is wrong.
For much of the time the policy was being written the point was not only to merge the two policies, but to do cleanup and to add defacto policies which were currently not codified.
That's why there's a whole subdiscussion about popular culture sources.
It later got changed, much more recently, to be an attempt to simply merge the policies. This was *not* the intent for most of the time.