Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2013-03/Standards of identity and legal definitions of terms

Voting on: whether and how to include standards of identity and legal definitions, such as the USDA definition of "mayonnaise" or the state of Vermont's definition of "murder". In particular, voting on: the adoption of the following policy, to be housed in Wiktionary:Standards of identity and legal definitions:

Many terms, such as mayonnaise, partially defatted pork fatty tissue, and murder, have been given precise definitions by legislative and regulatory bodies.

Whenever a term exists only because it has a specific legal meaning, it should be included if it meets all other relevant criteria for inclusion. If different legal or regulatory standards give it definitions which are somewhat different but from which a basic sense may be generalized, only the basic, generalized sense should be included.
Whenever a legal or regulatory standard has given a common term a definition which is merely an extension or restriction of the term's usual definition, the legal/regulatory definition is to be listed in an appendix, not in the entry itself. However,
Whenever a legal or regulatory standard has given a common term a definition which is unusually different from the term's usual definition, that legal definition should be included if it meets all other relevant criteria for inclusion.

For example,

The term "partially defatted pork fatty tissue" was coined to designate the product that entry describes. [But] If EU law were to allow skin, while US law disallowed it, it would be best to remove mention of skin from the (single) definition, or say "either excluding or including skin", rather than to have two or more definitions.
The legal definitions of these terms would go in appendices: "margarine", "first-degree murder", and "second-degree murder".
The "abetting of any criminal act which results in the death of a person" sense of murder is unusually different from a term's common sense, and would be included per the third point. [But] If one jurisdiction's version of that sense excludes spitting as a criminal act that murder can result from, while another jurisdiction includes it, such specific senses would not be added, only the generalized sense would.

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