What are the commonly accepted guidelines specific to this site (2015)?

Question

At Folklore or official policy?, I wrote, "I feel like I've come into the movie theater in the middle of the movie. Please, help me understand what's going on in this site and what is expected of me."

Highlighting some material from that thread:

We write stuff in comments that is too obvious to qualify for an answer. [Such-and-so] is not really a topic for a site for linguists and etymologists, and we don't want it to become a topic.

As for formal or official policies, it seems to me Stack Exchange has a relative lack of them.

The closest thing to formal policies that I know of are the documentation in the Help Center, and the mechanics of the site itself.

SE etiquette is that meta questions are about an issue, not a user, so names are usually left out of questions on meta to avoid making it about a particular user.

Also, today I read

this site has a policy of not discussing poetry

at meaning of "trailing clouds of glory".

I'd like to assume that the goal is not to set up a mine field for newcomers trying to make meaningful contributions to this site. So let's be constructive. I would like to invite users in the know to help me assemble a compendium of generally accepted guidelines/conventions to this site. Answers would be preferred over Comments. I'd appreciate it if you would avoid bringing up anything potentially controversial here. (You could always create a different question in Meta about a particular item or set of items.) Also note, this question isn't about mechanics.

---

Here's another one: A word to mean the act of making two things equivalent?

Please set mentions in italic.

This is also confusing. I see many people setting their word or phrase proposals in bold.

---

I found another one!

'‘If we accept the axiom that trivial [/very basic] questions are bad for the site, then the proper response to [such] a ... question is: 1.Don't answer! 2… [Vote] to close. The point is not to encourage trivial [/very basic] questions. If you post an answer or vote up an existing answer, you're implicitly encouraging more questions like it.’

(taken from https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270603/can-i-use-they-for-non-living-things)

Answer 1

“Please set mentions in italic”

Let me address the final point.

Yes, some people do set mentions in bold, but I really wish they wouldn’t. For the past five years, ELU editors have followed this simple standard posted by nohat♦ on October 15^th 2010 at 8:05pm:

I usually use italics. Sometimes I use “double quotation marks” when referring to long phrases or whole sentences. I would stay away from bold, verbatim, or plain.

His policy offers these advantages at the least:

1. It is the top-voted answer to the meta question about the matter. In the absence of explicit directives to the contrary, this therefore represents community consensus on site policy.

2. Although it is one member’s preference and style, it was posted by one of our moderators, and this cannot help but carry some guiding weight.

3. It is short, simple, and to the point. This makes it easy to remember and to apply.

4. It has been there for five years as of this writing, setting long-standing precedent.

5. It’s the standard used by dictionaries and professional linguistics journals, and is therefore the appropriate one on a site whose charter is “for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts”.

6. Those of us who do the most editing have been consistently following this standard as long as the site has existed. This helps give our site a well-groomed look.

7. It is typographically inoffensive, because the overall color (how much black, basically) of the Georgia italic face matches that of the Georgia roman one, allowing the page to look professionally put together.

8. It presents a unified page color, which is highly desirable. Interrupting the smooth texture of the paired roman and italic with inline super-heavyweight bold scattered randomly about the page destroys that simple elegance.

9. The default font weight all browsers give to bold in the absence of CSS to reduce it is much too heavy a weight to look tidy. Without a CSS hack which our style sheet does not have, we suffer a ponderous and plodding default bold weight that no publisher worthy of the name would ever dare set down in print.

10. Bold used for things other than headers* leaves the page looking too SHOUTY, as though it were a cheap supermarket tabloid, a seven-year-old’s workbook, or a ransom note. It isn’t nice to be yelled at by a noisy page.

11. To give the occasional point special emphasis, the skilled writer competent at his craft need use nothing but the English language itself — rather than tawdry typographical blunderbusses.

That’s plenty enough to convince me. I only hope it also persuades others.

---

_{* And even then you should rely on point size allowing the weight to scale proportionately.}