I have been thinking about this for sometime. As you know, SE has changed the Community Wiki policy and now only moderators can make a question a CW. Community Wiki has 2 main effects:
- The question becomes owned by community, the original OP does not gain reputation,
- The required reputation to edit drops to 100,
and a side effect:
- The answers posted after a questions becomes a Community Wiki become Community Wiki automatically, i.e. the answers are owned by community, (but answers posted before the question becoming CW don't).
These three effects are not always correlated and there are cases that one wants to have one of these three but not the other two, e.g. the owner does not want to earn reputation but wants the users answering the question to earn reputation for their answers. So it seems to me that SE is mixing too many things in one concept and that is the main reason for many issues we had and have with CW policy.
Robin brought up the idea that we should make the non-CW answers to a CW question CW also. I have a problem with answers becoming CW when the question becomes CW because sometimes the answers deserve to earn reputation, but in the current situation it makes sense, if the answers need to be CW then the previous ones also need to be CW, on the other hand a user might not have answered a question if it was a CW question so I don't know what is the right thing to do here.
I see three clear reasons for making a question a CW (and it would be nice to add other reasons to this list):
- OP doesn't want to earn reputation (for some reason),
- OP wants to allow others to edit,
- the question is a ranking list.
For example I think a question like this and this should be CW but the answers should not be and the users answering them should earn reputation for their answers.
Another issue is that the new policy is not clear on what we should do when we think a question or answer needs to be CW, I used to flag some posts for moderator attention but don't do it any more because I now think it is not very nice to suggest someone else question or answer should be CW to the moderators, so I have decided to go with a softer way of adding comments like "I would upvote it if it becomes CW".
I have an proposal that I think might solve some issues and would like to hear what others think about it:
In general the question or answer should be made CW only on the request of the owner (with some exceptions, see below), other users that think the post should be CW can leave a non-abusive comment like: "nice answer, I would upvote it if it becomes CW" and up-vote only if/when it becomes CW.
Exceptions:
the OP is a drive-by user and does not reply to the answers or comments after considerable time,
some clear cases like: a ranking list. These should be explicitly included in the policy,
other special situations where the moderators have strong reasons for making a question CW.
What do you think about this proposal (agree, disagree, opinions, improvements and suggestions, ...) and CW in general?
ps: Another minor issue about CW is its (lack of) effect on badges, it seems strange that a user does not earn reputation but does earn badges for CW posts, e.g. I should not have earned a badges for these answers. Right now many of higher level badges are awarded for CW questions/answers, which does not seem a good thing to me.
Official FAQ for Theoretical Computer Science
Material to supplement the FAQ
MO policy
- https://meta.mathoverflow.net/discussion/6/when-should-questions-be-community-wiki
- https://mathoverflow.net/faq#communitywiki
SE policy
- Should the community wiki police be shut down?
- Community Wiki checkbox missing in action
- What can we do to make Community Wiki better?
- What are "Community Wiki" posts?