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Policycruft is a pejorative term used to imply that a unpopular policy was created by a small population of enthusiastic fans of the policy in question, with little consensus. The term is a neologism derived from the older hacker term cruft, describing obsolete code that accumulates in a program.
"Policycruft" also implies that the policy is unimportant and that the contributor's judgment of the topic's importance is clouded by fanaticism. Thus, use of this term may be regarded as pejorative, and when used in discussion about another editor's contributions, it can sometimes be regarded as uncivil and an assumption of bad faith.