Yeah. IMO Wikipedia's content policies and guidelines need revisiting and simplification (Yes, this would be hard, but it does need doing). At present they are needlessly complex ('written by committee') and this obstructs non-frequent users from making contributions or feeling like they can justify their edits against someone who can quote more of these rules than they can....
Also, they do tend to play into the hands of misuse by PR companies and the like. Its very easy, for instance, for a PR company to find a few 'reliable' news sources to say something online, then add it to wikipedia (often removing opposing views) under the banner of 'Verifiability'. It doesn't even matter if it is completely untrue.... I'm sure there are ways at stopping this (like being stricter on 'reliability') if Wikimedia were interested in trying.
I don't think its about 'eliminating' per se, but simplifying the structure of how it is all written, shortening and removing unnecessary cruft and duplication (which there is tonnes of). For instance the common-sense things that currently have multi-page long guidelines to describe them like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_create_hoaxes and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Do_not_disrupt_Wikipe.... It would be easy to remove these as separate guidelines and to just include the pertinent text of them (prob. doesnt need to be more than a couple of lines) is a more major policy/guideline.
They could also do with creating a better front-end page for understanding/browsing the various policies and guidelines.
Also, they do tend to play into the hands of misuse by PR companies and the like. Its very easy, for instance, for a PR company to find a few 'reliable' news sources to say something online, then add it to wikipedia (often removing opposing views) under the banner of 'Verifiability'. It doesn't even matter if it is completely untrue.... I'm sure there are ways at stopping this (like being stricter on 'reliability') if Wikimedia were interested in trying.