Rationale for Community Wiki

Question

Here's an idle question based on idle curiosity (so please don't feel obliged to spend time answering it; close/delete it if you like).

What's your rationale for making a question "Community Wiki"?

For example in the question titled Recommended budget waterproof jacket there's a comment, an up-voted comment, which says, "Converted to wiki, there's no right answer to this."

Is the reason:

• To prevent the question getting rep.?
• To prevent answers getting rep.?
• To make the questions and answers easier for other low-rep users to edit?
• Superstition (e.g. "if there's more than one right answer then it should be CW, for no particular reason")?
• Other?

Policy for CW has varied over the years and it's now something of a moderator decision, and I'm curious to know the benefit of CW. I once argued against the CW police myself and, as I said, I'm just idly/mildly curious to understand the actual or alleged benefit of CW in this situation.

This is presumably a question adressed only to the mods, e.g. Neil.

Answer 1

I view community wiki as two things

1. protection against questions with 30+ "answers", where it is forced (this threshold is 15 on superuser and programmers). Any question that has more than thirty so called-answers is not really a question any more, is it? It's some sort of discussion or list. Forcing wiki is a call to produce 30 readable answers through community editing rather than mindlessly, compulsively adding 60, 90, 120+ answers -- answers nobody will ever read -- piling up and cluttering the place.

2. for questions that are marginal-but-useful, that barely make the cut, sometimes community wiki can make them more palatable and survivable because they don't become unfair sources of upvote rep, and people are incentivized to participate in those questions for reasons other than reputation gain.

Note that it is impossible for users to make questions community wiki, but anyone can still mark answers community wiki.

We have provided some additional guidance at the blog:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/the-future-of-community-wiki/

TL;DR version

Most of the time, you should be asking yourself “How can I improve this post so that community wiki isn’t needed?” Community wiki is like a cheese knife: it is a specialized tool to be used sparingly, and only in very specific circumstances.

Answer 2

My rationale for making questions community wiki is: don't. (usually)

This site is supposed to be primarily for "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face". If we make a question CW, nobody gets rep and we're discouraging spending time writing good answers. That combination leaves very few cases where a CW question makes sense. The new approval process for editing questions and answers for lower-rep users has made CW even less useful.

I think historically CW has been used (here and on all of the SE sites) for questions that maybe simply should have been closed. That's a usage of CW that's now discouraged.

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I think our Terminology index - a list of bike part names and cycling concepts is a great example of what Community Wiki should be used for. But we only need one terminology index and maybe we don't even need that one.

There's an argument to be made that tag wikis are how to define terms, but the tag wikis weren't as functional when our Terminology index started, and many of those terms really aren't good tags, anyways.

So perhaps another rationale: if it's a question that could turn into another Terminology Index and the questioner asks for it to be made CW.

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I was curious and did a scan of the last times we created a new community wiki question on this site. Apparently we let in about one a month:

• Most recent: January 28. https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/2627/films-featuring-the-bicycle [closed] — off-topic question that we closed, but made CW first.
• Most recent non-closed: January 14. What do you bring in your winter pack? — I actually think this question should've been edited a bit and not made into a community wiki
• Next most recent: December 19. What are good bicycle review and comparison sites? — borderline question. A sort of poll. It's borderline, but could be useful.

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Another version:

• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/#comment-50698

Answer 3

Community Wiki can eventually happen automatically, under certain conditions.

freiheit's answer, "don't (usually)", is pretty good IMO.

Alternatives (instead of making a question CW) include:

• Wait for CW to happen automatically, if it does
• Edit and/or close the question if it doesn't meet the normal criteria for being a good question.

One (perhaps rare) time for CW is if you really want it to be Wiki-like, for example when:

• The question solicits multiple answers
• And each answer ought to be on a different topic
• And each answer ought to be edited by more than one person

The following are examples of when a question should or shouldn't be Wiki-like:

• What are the different types of grommet? (not CW because someone can reply to the question in a single, good, comprehensive answer)
• What are the characteristics of the various types of grommet? (CW because describing each and every grommet would be too long for a single answer: you want a separate answer for each type of grommet)
• What's your experience with using grommets? (not CW because each answer is personal or subjective and is, therefore, not intended to be edited by other people)

You needn't hurry to make a question CW. You can see how it evolves (whether the question is changed; how many answers it gets) before deciding that it's a topic that you want as a Wiki.