 | This is anexplanatory essay about theWikipedia:Policies and guidelines page. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not beenthoroughly vetted by the community. |
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Thedifference between policies, guidelines, and essays on Wikipedia is obscure. There is no bright line between what the community chooses to call a "policy" or a "guideline" or an "essay" or an "information page".
This explanatory essay itself is asupplemental page, which is an even more ambiguous group.[1] Essays, supplemental, help (how-to), information and template documentation pages generally have a limited status during deliberations as they have not been thoroughly vetted by the community through thepolicy and guideline proposal process. However, some essays and supplemental pages are widely accepted as part of the Wikipedia gestalt, and have a significant degree of influence during discussions.
How-to and information pages typically provide technical and factual information and are not often referenced during deliberations, but rather used for directing editors to pages about Wikipedia's processes and practices.
Various theories have been put forward as to what these differences are. Here are the most common misconceptions:
It's true that violating (some)behavioral policies likethe three-revert rule can get you blocked, but so can violating (some) guidelines, and even (some) essays. For example, the essayWikipedia:Single-purpose account andWikipedia:Here to build an encyclopedia are often cited in discussions aboutblocking and permanentlybanning editors.
On the other hand, violating other kinds of policies, such asWikipedia:Verifiability, is done constantly, by thousands of editors each week, without anyone getting blocked because of such violations.
Some editors wish this were true, but it isn't. Some policies, such asWikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, which is about 7,000 words long, are more than ten times the length of some guidelines and essays.
There are a remarkable number of exceptions and limitations embedded within Wikipedia's policies, and all policies need to be applied withcommon sense. Many guidelines, on the other hand, tell editors exactly what to do in a given situation. TheExternal links guideline, for example, does not permit any exceptions to its prohibition on linking to known copyright violations. Furthermore,Wikipedia:Ignore all rules is a major policy: We would not have a policy telling us that all policies and guidelines may be ignored (for sufficiently good reasons) if no exceptions could exist to policies.
This is usually combined with the erroneous belief that "prescriptive" means that the page usesimperative verbs, like "Do not ____", and "descriptive" means that the page uses the word "should" and variousweasel words.
In fact, the primary difference between beingprescriptive anddescriptive is whether the page istelling people what to do, or whether it is describing what people already do. Making a new rule for the purpose ofchanging the community's practice is prescriptive (e.g., the adoption of a rule thatWikipedia:Biographies of living persons will be deleted unless cite at least one source, at a time when many thousands of those articles were entirely unsourced). Writing down what the community already does is descriptive, no matter what words you use (e.g.,MOS:REFPUNCT, which describes what editors were normally doing anyway, long before the rule was written down).
The major content policies, in particular, arose out of the community's actual practices, and thus are correctly considered descriptive pages, even when they describe the community's long-established and widely supported practices in unflinching terms. Any page may use—and manyshould use—clear, firm, and direct language when describing a firmly established practice.
There is some truth in this: As a general rule policy pages tend to be watched by more editors, and changes to them scrutinized more closely. But there is no guarantee, in any concrete situation, that a given page marked as policy better reflects the ordinary practices or intentions of the community than a given page marked as a guideline. Indeed, sometimes the watching editors' resistance to changes in the text of policy pages can actuallyprevent those pages from evolving to reflect changed consensus in the wider community. (And some pages are policy only because they were marked as such a long time ago, when standards were different; some of them were tagged before Wikipedia distinguished between policies and guidelines.)
At the other end of the spectrum, some of the most widely supported advice pages, likeWP:Bold, revert, discuss andWikipedia:Snowball clause are supplement pages (explanatory essays), andWikipedia:Tag bombing andWikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose are essays. Other key pages, such asWikipedia:Five pillars haveno tag.
Some policies are rarely viewed or commented on. Some essays, supplemental and information pages are viewed thousands of times each week and are widely supported, such asWikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions andWikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. Nevertheless, how much a page is viewed or its number of incoming links does not always determine the page's status within the community.
This is actually true in some cases, but not always. First of all, what's written on any given advice page at any given moment may not accurately reflect the community's view—and it's the community's actual view that is the real policy, not the words on a page that says "policy" at the top.
More importantly, editors need to follow the most relevant advice. A broadly worded policy page, intended to provide only the most general outline of the goals, is not necessarily a better source of advice than a guideline that directly and explicitly addresses the specific issue at hand. For example, even thoughWikipedia:Verifiability technically allows low-quality, self-published blog postings as sources (under some circumstances), one would not wish to prefer such sources over the high-quality,independent sources published by third parties that are recommended by theWikipedia:Reliable sources guideline.