[WikiEN-l] rationale behind policy (was: CITE nazis)

[Steve Summit]

Mark Gallagher wrote:
> 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...

Indeed.  Very good point.

But this reminds me of an idea I had yesterday for ordinary
pages, which might apply to policy and other project-space pages
too.  Right now, for every page, there's an associated talk page.
What if every page had *two* associated pages, "Talk" and
"Rationale"?  Talk would be as it is now, but Rationale would
be a mostly-static (or at any rate as static as the main page)
description of *why* the main page says what it says, and why
it does not say the things it does not say.  That is, it would
contain the distilled consensus of everything you'd want a
would-be editor of the article to see, but which mere readers
would have no need for.

Today, talk pages sort of perform this function, but they're
so free-wheeling, and so subject to various ad-hoc kinds of
archiving, that it's an arbitrarily hard problem for a new editor
(who's trying to be responsible) to discover whether there's any
precedent or prior argument behind a change he's about to make,
that might be controversial or have been tried before and decided
against.

(Adding these hypothetical Rationale pages would be a sweeping
change, of course, and I'm not seriously proposing doing it,
but it's an idea to think about.)