Is Wheel of Fortune a yes or a no?

This card leans yes. It carries forward movement, and in a straight yes/no draw most readers take it affirmatively.

The Wheel is change you did not author. Cycles turn, luck moves, timing shifts. The card's hard teaching is that the wheel turns for everyone, and that position on it is temporary in both directions.

The consolation and the warning are the same sentence. A bad position is not permanent, and neither is a good one, which is why the card reads as relief to somebody at the bottom and as a caution to somebody at the top.

Waite removed the human figures that earlier decks showed being crowned and crushed, and left a mechanism marked with the divine name and the four fixed signs reading books at the corners. The tradition's point is that the turning is lawful rather than random, even where it is entirely outside anybody's control.

Yes/no readings are the most popular use of tarot and the one it is worst suited to. A seventy-eight card deck built to describe nuance is being asked for one bit of information, and most of what it knows is discarded in the process.

A more useful version of the same draw: read Wheel of Fortune as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. A turning point, generally favourable. Luck, opportunity, the arrival of something you could not have arranged. Take it while the wheel is where it is, because it will not stay.

The urgency is the useful part. This card describes a window rather than a state, and its characteristic failure is deliberation: the opportunity examined carefully until it has moved on. Where other cards reward thinking it through, this one does not.

It also asks for a particular kind of honesty about credit. What is arriving here was not earned in any straightforward way, and readings that convert luck into desert tend to age badly when the wheel comes round.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. A downturn, bad timing, or resistance to a change already underway. It can also indicate a cycle repeating because its lesson has not landed: the same situation with different names in it.

That last reading is the one worth sitting with. The Wheel reversed frequently describes a pattern rather than an event, and the giveaway is that the details differ every time while the shape does not.

The tradition is careful not to moralise here. Some downturns are patterns and some are simply the wheel, and a card cannot tell you which. Reading every setback as a lesson you failed to learn is its own error, and a cruel one when somebody is having a bad year for ordinary reasons.