Wikipedia:Snowball clause

This is an explanatory essay about the Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy and Wikipedia:Ignore all rules policies. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.

Shortcuts WP:SNOW WP:SNOWBALL WP:SNOWCLAUSE WP:SNOWCLOSE

This page in a nutshell: If a process only has a snowball's chance in hell of success, use common sense and don't follow the process all the way to the end, just for procedural sake. But if there are any doubts, do not terminate the process prematurely.

The snowball clause is one way that editors are encouraged to exercise common sense and avoid pointy, bureaucratic behavior. The snowball clause states:

If an issue has a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted by a certain process, there's no need to run it through the entire process.

The snowball clause is designed to prevent editors from getting tangled up in long, mind-numbing, bureaucratic discussions over things that are foregone conclusions. For example, if an article is speedily deleted for the wrong reason (the reason was not within the criteria for speedy deletion), but the article has no chance of surviving the normal deletion process, it would be pointless to resurrect the article and force everyone to go through the motions of deleting it again.

The snowball clause is not policy, and there are sometimes good reasons for pushing ahead against the flames anyway; well-aimed snowballs have, on rare occasions, made it through the inferno to reach their marks.^[1] The clause should be seen as a polite request not to waste everyone's time.