On 5/21/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm, fair enough. But I was particularly annoyed by practical problems, e.g. the section on disambig pages, which really was written as instructions suitable for coding a bot and had demonstrably led to editors reducing the usefulness and followability of disambig pages to enforce the guidelines as hard rules.
Yeah, I see what you mean. [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)]] is kind of a mess. That page could do with a rewriting (and loosening up), but I would still argue that the main MoS page and most of the other subpages are pretty damn decent. I mean, their huge and unreadable if you are trying to memorize them, but if you are looking for a specific style point, they're very useful.
Also, I would like to point out that the MoS is one of the wikipedia policies that actually work very well (a cynic would say "one of the few", but that's not me!) I mean, wikipedia is very consistent with its style without hurting the articles themselves. I mean, with infoboxes, succesionboxes, references, intros and everything else. These things are done well throughout the encyclopedia and make us look very polished indeed. Sometimes they lead to craziness (especially the boxes), but mostly it works out fairly nice
--Oskar