Thomas Larsen wrote:
Wikipedia's rules are _way_ too complicated:
This wasn't the case seven years ago, when Wikipedia was new. But since then, two things have happened: Wikipedia has gotten seven years older, and Wikipedia has attracted thousands of people. The number of man-months spent working and thinking on the project has resulted in significant complexity.
We should ask ourselves if the old sentence (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) "that anyone can edit" really holds true any more. I think it's about as true as "anyone can learn to play the piano". Despite this democratic aspect of music, we still have professional musicians. To be a skilled and successful contributor to Wikipedia today requires significant training and practice. If some people can join in without preparation, it's because their background (as programmers, or similar) has prepared them. That's not "anyone".
If you start a project on the basis that Wikipedia is too complicated, you are likely to fool yourself. Your project will be different only as long as (1) it is far younger than Wikipedia and/or (2) it has attracted far fewer people than Wikipedia. For a successful project, you want neither of these.
You need a way to keep a project simple *despite* attracting lots of users and accumulating over time. Maybe you have that formula, only time can tell. The wonder of Wikipedia is that it isn't far more complicated than it is. Ask some people who work on industrial development projects involving the same amount of people and time, and you'll find many examples that have been faster in accumulating complexity ([[Cruft]], feature creep).
People say, "Abide by the spirit of the policies, not the letter," but in this case why not make policies simple?
You're welcome to hack away at this. Did you try to?