I don't suppose we'll ever solve this equation since tourng weight is such a personal thing. And confusing as well. Are we talking about weight of the bike, weight of the bike and racks and panniers/handelbar bag. With of the bike fully loaded with or without consumables. Do consumables include just water or fuel and food as well? How much food and water - a day's worth, two days or whatever? All very nebulous.
Just me, but for me it is a little more simple. When I talk about weight here it is with regard to packing choices. I figure that others will have different situations, standards, and different needs. So they may want to use different numbers, but it is important to say what number you are using. That said if someone uses something other than base gear weight or maybe base total bike and gear weight, I am likely to gloss over and move on without really registering what the weight means.
I include gear, clothing, and the bags or panniers they are in. I refer to it as
gear weight to avoid confusion with total bike weight, and total bike and rider weight. I could easily see an argument for including the racks in the gear weight, but it seems to me as if that muddies any real chance of meaningful comparison of gear choices wrt weight.
Total bike weight including gear is a useful number, but it is in my opinion a poor number to use in comparing gear choices since the bike would skew the numbers pretty heavily between folks who choose different style bikes (or folks who ride different bikes on different tours). Also I try not to get too obsessed over bike choices, I am more inclined to ride one of the bikes I have and not worry about swapping components too much beyond what it takes to meet some minimum standards like sufficient range of gearing.
Total bike and rider weight might be very useful for the rider to evaluate a number of things for themselves, but it is a useless measure for comparing notes with other riders.
To my way of thinking there is no point in trying to include consumables in any weight reported except maybe if someone were to report what their maximum load was at some specific point on tour. For example it might be interesting to know what my total bike weight plus consumables topped out at when I had a long stretch with no resupply capability and carried far more food and water than usual. The thing is that it is just an anecdote about some specific incident and I most likely would not know the number any way. There isn't likely to be a scale handy in the middle of the tour when the situation arrives.
Food, water, and fuel are all extremely variable both throughout the weeks or months of a long tour, but even over the course of the day. Then there is the fact that some may pack a weeks worth of food or more and some may pick up their food for the evening in the afternoon most of the time. I'd usually have no really accurate way of knowing what that number would be at any point except before the start and maybe at the finish if I finished the tour somewhere with a scale (not a given). I generally pack at home with no food, fuel, or water, fly to the start of the tour. I assemble the bike in the airport and start riding from there. Food, fuel, and water are obtained along the way and typically in small quantities frequently. The notion of including some number of days of food is a non-starter for me because most often I don't carry any more food than enough to get to the next store with a bit of cushion.
For folks who might pack food for some number of days and maybe leave from home having already fully loaded and also having access to a scale that all up number may be easy to know, but it still isn't especially useful for comparing and evaluating gear choices.
