What is the intention of 'community wiki' questions?
Probably a bit of a noob question, but I can't quite see what service the 'community wiki' question provides.
I can understand that it allows others to edit your question. (As per the 'This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >750 is welcome to improve it.' text). It creates an optional lower bar; normally a user would have to have 2000 karma to edit a post. I also see that answers can be made into 'community wiki' answers.
But then what?
The feature isn't really documented as far as I can tell, and where other features usually have obvious functionality this one seems a little lost.
Is the idea that 'communities' ie all the members of the site, will have certain pages that they wish to make wiki pages?
How can users see these pages? Is there a filter that can be applied somehow? Perhaps wiki questions should be marked with a small graphic on the main page. Perhaps wiki questions (and or wiki answers) should float to the top of the main page.
I'm not sure because I'm not sure what it's designed to do.
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2 Answers
To be honest I don't know how useful this feature is. In SO wiki is used mainly to make posts not affecting the user reputation.
I find it mostly useless and don't mind at all disabling it or even removing altogether.
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I believe Community Wiki emerged on SO primarily as a way of preventing abuse of the reputation system. See the FAQ entry on SO's Meta.
- Posts are automatically marked as CW if they are edited more than a certain number of times (since editing a post bumps it to the top of the homepage, this acts as a way of preventing people from "spamming" the homepage in an attempt to gain unfair reputation-by-exposure).
- For popular but not constructive questions, moderators often mark the question and all its answers as CW so that nobody benefits from participating in an off-topic or otherwise not-good-fit question, but they can still keep the content around (you'll see this a lot on "polling" questions).
You might also find the SE blog post on "The Future [sic] of Community Wiki" to be of interest.
One thing to note is that CW was considered to be much more important on SE before they implemented peer-reviewed editing... which, incidentally, is a feature I would love to see in Askbot (:
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Asked: 2012-03-03 13:33:41 -0500
Seen: 185 times
Last updated: May 04 '12
The feature can be disabled in the settings.
Evgeny ( 2012-05-04 14:10:59 -0500 )edit