Wikipedia:Semi-policy

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✘ This Wikipedia page is currently inactive and is retained as a historical archive.
Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus has become unclear. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you should seek broader input via a forum such as the proposals page of the village pump.
"Semi-policy" is not presently used for any official classification of pages. Pages should now be classified as "proposed", "guideline", or "official policy". Please see Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines for more information. For listings, see Category:Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

Wikipedia has a number of official policies that can be considered rigid rules - NPOV and No personal attacks, for example. It also has some things that are very definitely not rules - several failed revisions to the structure of some of the official mechanisms of Wikipedia like AFD and RFA. Finally, it has a vast grey area, in which it's likely that most of what you do on Wikipedia will fall into. Some things in this grey area are acceptable only in a handful of extreme and narrow situations. Others are de facto community practices that have been in place for ages but never codified in a way found acceptable to everybody. The fact that something is listed as semi-policy gives no information about how close or far to policy it is. It could be very, very far away. it is generally a good idea to get some community input on whatever specific case you want to apply semi-policy to before acting.

Listing something as semi-policy is not an attempt to turn something that is not policy into policy - rather, it is an attempt to acknowledge that something exists in a gray area, on the assumption that a spoken gray area is preferable to an unspoken gray area.

There is, obviously, no consensus on whether or not it is acceptable to follow semi-policy. But, generally, something that has been listed as semi-policy has been found acceptable in at least one circumstance in the past, and there is a reasonable probability that another circumstance where it is imaginable might arise again. The exact limits of those circumstances, however, are rarely codified - if they were, there would probably be official policy.

In the interests of recursion, no effort has been made or will be made to make any aspect of this page - including whether or not semi-policy is in any way or to any degree binding, acceptable, or anything else. This page is itself semi-policy, and thus has exactly as much legitimacy as all of the things listed on the page - however much that is. There is no consensus about the level of respect that semi-policy deserves. Some argue that this means it deserves none at all - policy is policy, and things that are not policy are, simply, not policy. Others dislike the reductionism of things falling into "policy" and "forbidden," and note that these are simply things there is no consensus on the acceptability of - after all, there is just as little consensus against them as there is for them.

In closing, the following comments made by User:Raul654 in IRC may be instructive from the practical standpoint of conducting one's behavior on en.wikipedia.org in such a way as to avoid being banned:

Raul654: Oh, while I am here, I'd just like to inform all of you of something
Raul654: Several members of the arbcom and Jimbo himself seem to agree with me on this
Raul654: (Jimbo explicetely agreed, actually)
Raul654: Not all of Wikipedia's rules are written down. You may be banned for violating unwritten,
community standards
Raul654: There is no explicit rule that says not to edit war on the main apge
Raul654: [username] got banned for it
Raul654: It's very simple - use common sense.
Raul654: Common sense says not to edit war on the main page
Raul654: If you do it, you do it at your own peril.

[edit] Compare and contrast