Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays

The difference between policies, guidelines, and essays on Wikipedia is obscure. There are no useful definitions for what the community chooses to call a "policy" or a "guideline" or an "essay".

Various theories have been put forward as to what these differences are, even though it's a waste of time. Here are the most common misconceptions:

Breaking policies gets you blocked.

It's true that violating policies can get you blocked, as can violating guidelines, essays, and even violating nothing written at all. WP:Tendentious editing is an essay by the principal author of WP:ROUGE about a silly word, but it is often cited in discussions about blocking and permanently banning editors.

On the other hand, violating other kinds of policies, such as WP:Verifiability, is done constantly, by thousands of editors each year, with almost no one getting blocked.

Policies are succinct.

Some editors wish this were true, but it isn't. Some policies, like WP:NOT, which weighs in at almost 50 KB, are more than ten times the length of some guidelines and essays.

Policies tell you what you must always do, and other pages just make optional suggestions.

Most Wikipedia policies and guidelines directly contradict each other. Many guidelines tell editors exactly what to do in a given situation. The External links guideline, for example, does not permit any exceptions to its prohibition on linking to copyright violations. Furthermore, WP:Ignore all rules is a major policy which invalidates all other policies, guidelines, and even itself.

Policies are prescriptive, and other pages are descriptive.

This is usually combined with a claim that "prescriptive" means that the page uses imperative verbs, like "Do not ____", and "descriptive" means that the page uses the word "should" and various weasel words.

In fact, the primary difference between being prescriptive and descriptive is whether the page is telling the community to change its current practice (to something the page's authors believe would be better), or whether it is describing the community's current, independently existing practice.

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 many should use—clear, firm, and direct language when describing a firmly established practice.

Policies are supported by a higher degree of consensus than guidelines.

There is some truth in this – policy pages tend to be watched by more editors, and changes to them go completely unnoticed. There is no guarantee, however, that a given page marked as policy better reflects the will 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 actually prevent 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 than they are now.)