Wikipedia:Rulespam

"Rulespam" is the excessive use of rules or instructional texts, such as listing numerous rules as an edit-intro text to display when editing a page. There are many thousands of rules in the various guidelines and policies of English Wikipedia, as people have created ever more sub-rules of sub-rules of prior guideline rules from years earlier. In general, beware the creation or display of too many rules, and instead, consider discussions to delete the excessive rules and remove the instruction lists from the related pages.

Instead of always listing long texts about the rules, consider just wikilinking to each page which explains further guidelines or restrictions. To help avoid rulespam, develop a set of criteria, or rule types, which can help to determine the appropriate sets of rules to include. In some cases, use of collaboration techniques, such as keep it simple or wp:Consensus, might help to identify the cases where rules might be simplified, or else combined or deleted.